Mari Menez is a Venezuelan artist with Wayuu and African roots. She has a degree in Arts with experience in museum management and university teaching. She currently resides in Colombia, where she develops her visual work, in which art and memory are combined, rooted in the world of her childhood, whose family scene was set by poultry, particularly roosters and hens, a domestic species from which she takes as predominant symbol the image of the rooster.

This bird, in the work of Mari Menez, personifies and transmits her memories, her nostalgia, in which the figure of her father, a cockfighting enthusiast, who suffered from Alzheimer’s for 14 years, plays a significant role. Interestingly, her paintings of roosters served as a stimulus for her father to recover his memories over the course of a year, thus acting her artistic creation as art therapy.

Later, she develops the theme of sexuality based on the image of this bird, which usually boasts its elegance and dominance, its masculinity, even though some are born with female plumage. Sexually, roosters and hens attracted each other by the size and color of their crests, which Mari Menez represents in an accentuated way in her compositions, in which the quality of the image of the different types of roosters is made with such sharpness and definition which leads us to associate her style with hyperrealism, although from where the figures of these birds are projected they are usually monochrome backgrounds, in some cases planes with uniform color, and in others, with gestural brushstrokes.

Generally, her roosters appear in a very close-up or foreshortened, which allows us to appreciate in detail the configuration of their physiognomies, particularly the intensity of the crest color and the lobes that hang on both sides of the beak.

José Gregorio Noroño