Carmen Maria’s recent work employs a grand range of visual texture. In some of her paintings, an austere simplicity reminiscent of Japanese prints fastens the eye cleanly to one fixed point, while in others a Klimptean agoraphobia, loaded with textiles and the tropes of textile design and quilt making, invite breathless, frenetic viewing.
In these canvasses, one finds a reverence for the mythological mingling beautifully with an unmistakable streak of mysticism. With her strong classical sense, Maria uses unmasked anachronisms- placing a figure in a modern pair of denim jeans on a classical Albertian grid, for example-or depicting modern lovers on the same canvas with a Trojan soldier-to evoke a sense of unsettledness within the banal and everyday. At the same time, the contrasts work to invoke not displacement but synthesis, suggesting that the classical is connected with the modern and the basic components of human reality constant. Carmen Maria lives and exhibits her work in Mexico City.
|