Marius Ionut Scarlat was born in Romania in 1993 and moved to Spain in 2005. He studied a degree in Audiovisual Communication at the University of Alcalá, although his career as a photographer began after studying a Master in artistic photography and documentary photographic narratives at the TAI School. His work has been recognized by different national and international organizations: Magnum Foundation; Sony Photography Awards; Emerging Photographer Fund - Burn Magazine; Tabacalera Cantera; La Máquina; Furures Photography by PhotoEspaña; INJUVE.

 

“Marius Ionut Scarlat immigrated with his family to Spain when he was only eleven years old, leaving behind a Romania that he logically felt as his own. Two worlds, Spain and Romania, thousands of kilometers apart, but with a common language and a common parent religion, although with different nuances, shared in the face of a truncated personal history and forced by family circumstances to understand and develop in a context that was, in spite of everything, different. Marius, in his training as a photographer, learns the essential technique, the language of this tool, but above all he focuses on developing the thought that he can pour on it. He learns from his teachers, from seeing exhibitions but, above all, from the books of authors who have been able to create their own discourse; he does not stop thinking about himself, about his personal history, about this whole process, in such a way that from the first moment he decides to show his work he does it in an absolute and singular way. Unlike most photography students, he quickly forgets to make beautiful pictures and embarks on his own introspective adventure that thinks not so much in creating isolated images but in the narrative that they can originate among a set. There is always his unstable self, his cultural duality, his movement between two worlds and all the questions that arise from this state. Here there are two essential themes to which he resorts: the crude and shameless family portrait, a brave portrait with the scourge of alcoholism of his uncle, and secondly, the relationship that his grandmother maintains day by day with death. His mind structures his work in a thought always poured into pages, into books, trying to build the same formal element with which he had formed himself. Everything therefore tends to be a book with images that generate chapters that follow one after the other, enriching one by one the different aspects that he photographs as part of his sincere, personal and necessary reflection”.

 

By Rafael Doctor Roncero.

 

"Marius's natural talent for fortography already stands out in the captures taken at a very early age. He has a restless and quick eye that generates masterful compositions with little effort. His snapshots are fresh, intimate and, above all, honest. They captivate from the first moment because we detect the dose of latent authenticity in each gesture and look: there are no artifices or folds, only presence. The ease in the poses are the result of hundreds of hours in which Marius has interacted with his spontaneous models. They are used to seeing him behind the camera, so much so, that at times they forget that he is always at work. The scenes show the simple life of the inhabitants, their daily chores and ceremonies, the work in the fields, the animals, the young people having fun who could have been him… Marius Ionut Scarlat makes a magnificent critical x-ray of Romanian society, questioning the religious pillars on which it is based”

 

By Nerea Ubieto.