Moments Before the Explosion: Mariana Cordoba’s Abstraction

Mariana Cordoba’s paintings—built on unprimed linen and shaped by deliberate negative space—offer abstraction as a kind of confession. The work holds intense emotion without spilling, even as the viewer feels a near-inevitable “explosion” waiting just beyond t

When I stand in front of one of Mariana Cordoba’s paintings. the first thing I feel is not the image—it’s the body that made it. I start picturing her weight shifting, her pulse keeping time, a crowd of thoughts moving through her. Then the scene clears, and what remains is a hand and the paint it carries.

The painting holds that vanishing inside itself. Movement sits on the surface like a message that refuses to translate itself. It could be anger. It could be sorrow. It could be a flash of pure exhilaration. Mariana doesn’t rescue me with explanation. She lets me decide. And once I’ve decided, the work still doesn’t lock me in. It keeps its own counsel.

Time is part of the encounter. Follow her paintings across the years and they start behaving like a record of a life—colours and marks shifting as if they’re responding to whatever is happening inside her. Hard blues sharpen and cool. Yellows soften the way a season turning does. Winter loosens into summer on the canvas. though the weather feels less like the sky outside and more like something further in. closer to the heart.

That’s the power of abstraction here: it doesn’t fix a single meaning. It makes room for the viewer’s own reading, and for everyone beside me, to read something different. The painting becomes a mirror as much as a window. No two people step away with the same picture.

Still, for all that force, these paintings don’t spill.

The edge of the canvas does the disciplining Mariana won’t do herself. Its rectangle gives her emotion a beginning and an end. What can look like chaos at first turns out to be controlled—held in check by where she chooses to stop. by the rhythm of decisions that keep the work from collapsing into pure mess. The negative spaces—those deliberate bare patches—aren’t empty. They’re as eloquent as the dense ones, the breath between marks, the silence that lets the noise mean something.

Material matters, too. Mariana works on unprimed linen, refusing the smooth barrier a primer would create. The rawness shows. Nothing is sealed off. Nothing pretends to have been planned in advance. Her emotion meets the material directly, and the evidence stays visible.

If I leave with one hope. it isn’t about understanding her less—it’s about watching her let go further. I want to see the feeling outgrow its frame entirely. I want colour to crawl past the edge. leak down onto the wall. drip across the floor and reach the ceiling. I want the controlled chaos to tip into chaos, and the whole room to become the painting.

The discipline is already there—hard-won and plainly visible in the restrained edge and in the bare linen she keeps offering back to us. What remains is a thrilling possibility, the sense that her practice feels less finished than gathering force.

That force matters beyond the canvas, as well. I believe London. where Mariana studied her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. is richer for holding it. I came across her work for the first time there. and what she brings feels like something the city can’t manufacture on its own: a painter who treats abstraction as confession. and who carries a Colombian-American inheritance into the heart of British painting.

To my mind, she widens what the UK art scene can hold. The conversation around it can be more honest, more international, and more alive for having her voice inside it.

Mariana Cordoba painting review abstraction unprimed linen Royal College of Art London art scene negative space Colombian-American inheritance contemporary art