Curator Tatiana Gecmen-Waldek in conversation with artists Holly Biörklund and Esteban Fuentes de Maria
If stone could speak, what riddles would it reveal?
Each artwork in this exhibition holds a riddle, its content intrinsically mystified. Expressed through metaphor and allegory, not necessarily meant to be decoded, but to be drawn into. The primary layer is the metamorphic material itself, shaped by pressure, heat, and time, dense with geological memory. The second layer is the artist's unique imprint: intuitive, reflective, and fleeting. Yet, the riddle truly comes alive within the viewer's subjective apprehension. Marble Riddles drifts between matter and myth, object and enigma, summoning sensitive ingenuity.
Marble Riddles brings together British artist Holly Biörklund and Mexican artist Esteban Fuentes de María in an intimate conversation through fifteen stone paintings. Sharing a lineage in mural painting, a tradition rooted in human migration, cultural exchange, and evolving mythologies. Once ceremonial or spiritual, murals connect them to prehistoric rock art, often monumental and carrying the weight of walls; in Marble Riddles, Biörklund and Fuentes de María turn inward, distilling mural composition into hand-held precious fragments, like the minute scale frescoes once discovered on Hydra, Greece.
The archetypal "noble stone” functions here as both canvas and conceptual armature for their respective approaches; Biöklund and Fuentes de Maria paint the stone with image and rhythm, repurposing leftovers that hover between relic and rêverie, mythology, and symbology.
Biörklund's iconography whispers of natural spirits and forgotten folklores. Her delicate, layered imagery seems to emerge from the stone itself, suggesting alchemy between imagination and mineral memory, introducing precious talismans intentionally powerful.
Fuentes de María's Hellenic connoted labyrinths, protective eyes, and Cycladic elements are part of his larger surrealist cosmology, shaped by his deep engagement with myth, history, nature and space. As Michelangelo famously said, for him, the marble already holds the image; the artist merely reveals it.
While each artist maintains a distinct visual anthem, their works, as minute fresco details, invite contemplative, almost up-close scrutiny. Placed within a setting that is part studiolo, part shrine, marmaron becomes eloquent, giving new life to the discarded that might otherwise remain obsolete.
If the riddle, like the fragments, once belonged to a larger mythopoetic frame, might it now influence the creation of one’s personal mythology?
TGW: You’ve participated in the Hydra Art Residency at the Old Carpet Factory in 2023. During this time you created a site-specific commission, a hidden mural delicately woven into the walls of the 18th-century historical landmark. How do place and atmosphere influence what you choose to paint?
HB: Hydra is built from the people and experiences that fed into its rocks and trees and buildings, we are always trying to capture that thing that is around us on a particular day when it feels so good, the spirit of the way it felt to be standing there, in that light, with that sound, my paintings are captures of the spirit. Talismans and Spirits, not exactly past entities but spirits of a collective moment or experience, maybe the spirit of a song or a party.
TGW: What is your relationship with the objects or materials you work with ?
HB: Riffing off the belief systems help world over (Animism, Feng Shui; Taoist Object Energy, Lares and Penates, Manitou) that objects are not wholly inanimate. The Japanese belief of Tsukumogami that objects can gain spirit after 100 years is a belief I also apply to the work and care of craftsman and artists, by creating objects by hand, by imbuing all you have into material, it carries forth a kind of power.
TGW: How does the surface you paint on shape the image that appears ?
HB: Marble is not inert repository of time, it has been witness to the centuries of waves, footsteps and stories. Through making my paintings on its surface is like reviving a sleeping memory, figurative, abstract, and lyrical marks the natural fissures, veins and textures become integral, the medium is also the narrative. It becomes foundation. Silent. Present. Ordinary. And still: what magic it took to get here. Marble, with its already geological memory in this sense becomes more than a stone, it's a sort of witness. It sits still while life moves over and around it, carrying not only weight but time, gesture, and human presence. It becomes quietly saturated with the world. That, to me, feels sacred. The longer an object exists in the world — passed through hands, surrounded by lives, placed in rooms where conversations happen, the more it seems to gather presence. There’s a kind of charge that builds, as if the material absorbs the layers of living that occur around it, and begins to hum with its own frequency. To me, it reflects a kind of personal truth: the parts of myself that have been pressed and shaped by time, that have felt buried or overlooked, are often the most quietly enduring. I suppose I’m trying to make peace with the fact that life isn’t clean or linear. It is a build up of time, full of fracture and polish, silence and expression — and I think that’s where the meaning lives. Layers upon layers of stillness and gravity, but also light, and memory.
TGW: You describe marble not just as a surface, but as a narrative medium. How do you navigate or respond to the natural qualities of the marble, its fissures, veins, and embedded histories, while composing your imagery ?
HB: When I work I try to make space for that kind of layered resonance. I’m drawn to what feels dense with memory, like something you could lean your body against and feel the vibrations of other lives. I want the work to feel infused — like it remembers, when you hold the stone there is an immediate understanding that it has lived - it is a feeling of grace.
TGW: You align your practice with magical realism, how does this genre serve your intention to bring the sacred into the everyday ? How do you bring attention to what’s often overlooked in daily life?
HB: I believe this is the way to bring attention to the sacred in our everyday lives and to help us question the things we cannot understand, by placing them against what is most familiar to us. I also love to think of the Japanese idea of Kintsugi here too, mirroring the idea that beauty and meaning are found in the combination of what is broken, weathered and renewed. What remains are not broken fragments but clear and singular notes from a larger chorus. In this way I hope to merge something from everyday life with something more sacred, I love the idea of the sacred and the mundane. Marble is a perfect metaphor of this, formed by heat and pressure and time it feels almost alchemical and yet here it arrives.
Tatiana Gecmen-Waldek in Conversation with Esteban Fuentes de Maria
TGW : How do you think growing up in a family of ornithologists has shaped your visualsensitivity and love of the many significances of birds, do you cherish some in particular ?
EFM: Yes, the birds diversity, the dream of humans, but also the freedom they represent. My family has taught me the art of observation and the love of nature in general as they were recording bird species by painting them in the wilderness.
TGW Being Mexican, with a legacy of muralist such as Diego di Rivera, You began your career painting murals, often grand in scale. What kind of transformation occurs for you when that same impulse is compressed into a small piece of noble stone and become 3D ?
EFM I see my murals as immersive experiences, almost sculptural. Being Mexican, I was always drawn to the idea of space. how a mural interacts with architecture, how it transforms perception. Over time, especially during the pandemic, my work became more Baroque, richer in depth. The complexity of form intensified, yet my approach to space remained the same. The mural isn’t just painted; it’s embedded into the structure itself.
TGW In what ways do your Mexican roots and exposure to European contexts, especially in Paris and Rome, converge in your work ? Do you see your painting as a form of cultural amalgamation ?
EMF The city of Puebla grounded me; it's the essence of Mexican artistic tradition. Rome, on the other hand, became a second home. It taught me about grandeur, history, and timelessness. Both places helped me understand the role of architecture in storytelling. Every wall, every structure holds a narrative, and I try to bring that to life.
TGW: Your work frequently navigates symbolism. How do you view the role of myth in contemporary life, especially when layered onto a material as ancient as marble?
EMF Myths are reflections of our reality. The myth of Icarus resonates deeply today. we’re constantly pushing boundaries, soaring high, but we also face the consequences of ambition.
This is particularly true when we talk about borders. both physical and personal. We create walls, rules, separations, yet they are always challenged. Myth allows us to explore these tensions. Labyrinths are born from my Mexican reality. They represent borders, not just geographical separations but divisions rooted in religion, culture, and economy. The idea of the border itself fascinates me. Natural borders exist, but the most significant ones are human-made, we paint them into our landscapes, into our minds. For instance, Latin America is deeply tied to the border crises. There, the idea of separation is palpable, beyond just politics. It’s a socio-political
TGW: You’ve worked with many materials : leather, ceramics, bone, even the skeleton of a Quetzalcoatlus. What draws you to marble in this context ? What does it activate in your imagination?
EFM: Michelangelo taught me that the sculpture is already there; the artist merely reveals it. That idea deeply influences me. My work isn’t just creating, it’s translating an existing form, carving meaning into space. Myth and history guide me in that revelation.
TGW If your minute frescoes could speak, if it had its own riddle, what do you imagine it might reveal ? Or what would you want us to remember of your work, centuries from now?
EMF My muse is nature. Nature teaches patience, destruction, rebirth. it carries the same depth as the myths we tell. And, ultimately, that’s what my work aims to capture: the timeless dialogue between art, myth, and the human experience.
Photography by Ekaterina Juskowski