Cristina Marques and her luminous talismans
One sees small pieces of walls that never feel like blockades. Thin opening walls. Plexiglas transfigured to ravishing marvels. Cristina Marques’ subtle space windows chase evil shadows. They open onto remote places, leap toward heights and silence gravity. An art made of bursts, transparencies and luminous borderlines. One sees fragile ramparts of vivacious light, thin chromatics as tightly bound as bandages and remote universe bubbles. Cristina Marques hits hard into essence and transcendence. The pieces she creates are so many precious talismans of radical presence, plural and fascinating. They create their own space within space… Each work is a fragile body, a milestone of strange beauty, where air and water are wed with living matter, always marked by vital traces.
The primary movement of her corpus binds expanses, enchants and embraces them with modesty. Adventurous traces roam this vibrating artistic breath and innervate it from within, as an infinite vein seemingly feeding the crevices of the universe. These bubbles of life never cease to dream in their photon jails. Each work is a minuscule piece of immensity: one’s gaze pierces through the piece, which is itself piercing through space.
With Cristina Marques, there are no appearances: surface and depth abandon their respective powers to work hand in hand. Inside and out, hard and soft, vertical and horizontal, everything merges. That is when Cristina Marques halts her creative alchemy at the height of her mental incisiveness, being, as she is, ever the magical space surgeon, and the piece comes to being through reined heat – perfectly chiselled, uniquely pure, resolutely dense and devoid of opacity. At the height of its bloom, the movement is fixed.
Its folds of subtle materiality, as secret magic formulae of spacecraft, take the universe as their sensual domain and indulge in silent poses. The curvatures of the intimate body leap up to penetrate the realm of the visible in flowing clouds. Cristina Marques summons all the agentive forces of the universe.
The skins of her works are immersed in organic, animal and mineral sources; they are branded with ancient memory, seals, sediments and imprints. Tenuous signs highlighting translucent beginnings, reading key of this corpus of works. A rich and vibrating form of abstract scripture flowers. Timeless protective tegument. Cristina Marques’ sensual abstraction harvests these primal and heterogeneous biological foundations, and then transfigures their original forms, stretched into ample curves of carnal voluptuousness. Eroticism of the fold where it deploys its intricateness, mellow and ductile – physical expression of subterranean affections. Snakes of light gush upwards, reorienting space.
Born in Vallauris, a city full of arts, Cristina Marques came from the world of jewellery and design. She invents a prodigious form of trump-space, a liquid, floating world of aerial marvels that carry radically audacious formalistic invention without excess, pathos or hubris. There is something minimalistic, streamlined and classy in her work, which always resists any overflow. Excess is unknown to her. Her architectural skies outlines a mysterious archaeology; something of the energy of the cosmos inhabits her spirally seductions. The invisible body haunting visual art is entangled to depth; it opens up onto the greatest human desires.
— Christian Noorbergen – May 2012
translated by Odyssée Bouvyer/La Condamine