Coins and bills become the canvas for Mari Roldán's art

I have often talked about art applied to simple and common objects, in my previous articles I have talked about toys, beer cans, and ropes, which manage to have an artistic dimension thanks to the intuitions of special people. Today we are going to talk about another common object, extremely every day, which often has a negative connotation, is considered dirty, is often the origin and reason for evil and, because of its absolutely concrete nature, is difficult to associate with art: money. And by money, I mean the physical object, like banknotes and coins, which a young Spanish artist, Mari Roldán, has made into artworks.

There has always been a link between banknotes and art, as very often nations have "promoted" their great artists on their banknotes, or have put their most famous works on them (and if you think about it, this is a good sign for a country), I immediately think of the 100,000 Italian Lira with Caravaggio and his "Canestra di frutta"("Fruit basket") for example. The advent of the Euro has undoubtedly taken away the imagination and variety of the various mints, but despite everything, the creation of a banknote always draws on art, because money must be "beautiful".

There are also those who consider art the composition of banknotes, more and more complex to avoid counterfeiting, with the inclusion of metal parts, plastic, holograms; the coins themselves are born from engravings of real artists. But what I am talking about is different. Here we exclude the more or less large artistic component inherent in the bill, or what is depicted on it, here the banknote is reduced to a simple canvas, to support new work, to be elevated to unique artwork.

Mari Roldán is a young Andalusian artist who had the great idea of using current banknotes and coins as supports for her works. Using mainly acrylic paints Mari reproduces, in a miniaturized version, great masterpieces of art, works by Van Gogh, Klimt, Picasso, Magritte, and also modern works by Bansky or Andy Warhol; generally on a single banknote, in some cases on several bills that must be aligned to get the whole picture.

Given the great success she received through social networks (here is her Instagram page @mariroldan) Mari has also extended his works to pop subjects such as cartoon characters, comics, or TV series.

In other cases the artist has modified the original works to communicate a message, adapting them to the current situation, as in the case of the "Creation" and the "Girl with Balloon" reinterpreted in a "Covid" version.

I also find very interesting the two bills related to The Simpsons, where a small part of the banknote is burned in a contextual way to the represented drawing as if to give an additional dimension to the work.

Mari Roldán's works are having great success and some of them can be purchased directly from the artist's page on Etsy (@MariRoldanArt) at still low prices, but who knows that the value of these works, maybe if they are circulating, could grow in the future, as happened to the four £5 bills engraved by Graham Short, which hid a micro engraving dedicated to Jane Austen: many will have had the good luck to hold those banknotes in their hands, but only the four people who recognized the work hidden in them, understood that they were holding an object whose value was not 5 but 50. 000 pounds.

As with these pounds, many of Mari's banknotes have been spent by her and then put into circulation, and in this case, it is impossible not to notice the difference with a normal banknote, she does this with the purpose of seeing how far banknotes can spread, even though it is very likely that whoever finds them keeps them for themselves. But perhaps this is where we ordinary people could contribute to art, and to Mari Roldán's message, not by stopping this spread, but by putting that banknote back into circulation as if it were any other, resisting the selfishness of keeping it, giving color and art to others. What would you do? Would you be able to buy bread or milk by paying with a Mari Roldán?

Images from Mari Roldán's Instagram and Etsy pages