Translucent apparitions
As one looks at a sculpture by Cristina Marquès, notions of dimension seem to slip away. This effect is due to the translucent nature of her art, lending it the spatial expansiveness of a trompe-l’oeil. Whether monumental or minimalistic, these Plexiglas pieces sweep up the viewer to a world cut off from mundane preoccupations, where only the sheer spatial beauty and intrinsic truth of the piece matter.
The titles she gives her pieces evoke visions of urban landscapes, underwater voyages, legendary apparitions, frozen constellations, glass buildings projecting onto a dreamt sky, flights, migrations and sacred mineral pile ups such as the cairns one finds in Tibet. Listing the elements making up her universe would only partly capture her creative identity.
The heart of the matter lies elsewhere. A true artist does not reproduce the visible world but recreates, in accordance to her very own rules, a universe to fit her needs, born from her experience of incompletion, her frustrations, her ideals. One might think that what Cristina Marquès yearns for most is clarity, order and harmony.
She is continuously writing scriptures in hieroglyphs, where art and the sacred merge. Where the visual sign vibrates on until it is united with its meaning.
The doors of her perception open onto vertigos, her abstractions seek weightlessness from whereunto one might fly out. At times one would feel as if her medium emancipated from its own physical constraints to convey her message.
Cristina Marques is a charmer of serpentine shapes, a voyager through celestial reefs, a loving heart of diastole and systole.
Sometimes death passes through her works, a few memento mori to express the value of life. That’s when her medium finds itself white and as if icy. Most of the time, though, Cristina Marques pays tribute to the flow of life, with an imaginative search for a way to simply convey the complexity of existence. Her translucent dreamt up world reveals a life in constant metamorphosis, unfolding and curling up awe-inspiring Möbius strings and unending Ouroboros, as so many self-imposed constraints in search of peacefulness. Oftentimes one finds humour, there – a lyrical and spiritual playfulness.
In short, one sees a spatial, cosmic form of writing, interlacing arabesques for the pleasure of the eyes and the quiet of the mind, from which greyness is relinquished. A universe rebuilt through the gift of youthfulness. The translucent quality of a clear creative mind.
— Michel Lagrange
translated by Odyssée Bouvyer/La Condamine