Josep Mañà - ‘The Skin’ of Marco Noris

Josep Mañà · 26.06.2022 · Last update: 16.06.2026 · Translation: Claude (Anthropic) · Project La Pell de la Terra · Topics: farrera, pallars, altarpieces, criticism, installations, la pell de la terra, dematerialisation

With the inauguration, on 23 June 2019, of the architectural rehabilitation of the hermitage of Santa Maria de la Serra, the villages of the Coma de Burg have gained and now have at their disposal a singular and spacious place, able to host cultural activities as well as others in keeping with the spiritual significance of the precinct.

Since then, the Centre d’Art i Natura de Farrera has carried out various actions and activities there. One of them was the artistic installation that the artist Marco Noris created on the occasion of the Festa del Cireral, held on Sunday 2 May 2021. This installation, although by its conception and fragility it has a temporary and ephemeral character, is currently still on display and can be visited.

Placed on the lintel that separates the nave from the apse, the work consists of a large painted canvas that hangs behind the altar. The translucent property of the support of this painting —a very fine and delicate paper— allows the light entering through the arrow slits to filter through it and act as a stained-glass window.

The large dimensions of the canvas and the multitude of contrasts and nuances generated by the light as it shines through the different tones of its dark chromaticism give the work an overwhelming and striking expressiveness.

The aforementioned characteristics and qualities, and the interaction of the work with the sacred connotation of the space where it is exhibited, evoke and foster the emergence of deep and ineffable emotions and feelings.

The eternal struggle and dialectic between light and darkness —the glows and the chiaroscuri, the luminosity and the dark nights of our vital and spiritual itineraries, individual and collective— find in this work by Marco Noris an explicit, accomplished and resounding plastic embodiment.

A relevant aspect of this artistic intervention is its appropriate and harmonious integration and interaction with the place and space that hosts it, both in the physical and in the meaningful sphere. In relation to this last aspect and with regard to the hermitage, silent witness of abandonment, war and exile, its recent and successful rehabilitation bears witness to the possibility of reversing destruction, and Marco Noris’s intervention makes patent to us that, behind the darknesses, there is light.

Josep Mañà
Farrera, June 2022