At the age of three months, Maria Martinez-Cañas left Cuba, and has not returned since, except in spirit. She has only her parents' memories of it: "My memories were in reality their memories." What, then, is the reality of Cuba for her? What is the meaning of this homeland that has never been home?

In 1983, in Spain for the first time, she exclaimed: "I felt I had finally come home." In Spain again in 1985-86, she studied archival materials having to do with the discovery of Cuba by Columbus. She examined old maps of the island, Havana, and other Cuban towns, as well as plans and drawings of old Cuban churches, fortresses, and ships. She measured and sketched and traced them from photocopies, with the originals in front of her. She absorbed herself in them, as though in self-recognition, fixing them in her mind as though they were personal memories. Also, she photographed the Spanish city in which a particular archive existed, as though to acknowledge its link, however indirect, with Cuba. Her spirit of research, thorough down to the last detail, had the obsessive quality of a person searching out the site of her own history and reconstructing the lost narrative of her life. But of course Martinez-Cañas has no significant life history in Cuba, and Spain is not Cuba, only the country connected to it by history and language: Spain is not really her homeland, but rather a springboard to a Cuba that no longer exists except in a screen memory, and has never really existed for her except in fantasy.

It is ultimately the same fictional, primordial land that we find in the work of Wifredo Lam, a source of inspiration for her. It is a surreal rather than historical Cuba, a pre-historical, wild Cuba of the imagination. With the same intensity with which she excavated and appropriated Columbus' Cuba, Martinez-Cañas excavates and appropriates Lam' style, which represents a profounder Cuba than that Columbus discovered. In identifying with it, she achieves an epiphany of Cuban identity, for Lam's jungle word is an artistic projection of her own unconscious.

But she does not give up Columbus' Cuba (or rather its Spanish derivatives -ironical screen memories). In an original constructive way, she inserts images associated with Columbus-type Cuba into Lam-like totemic forms, charged with aggressive eros -or is it erotic violence? Whichever, the combination of photo-realistic images of Spanish Cuba with irrational forms representing prelapsarian Cuba -the former bespeaks rational, the latter irrational attachment to Cuba -gives Martinez-Cañas a unified Cuban identity. (Ironically, all that is missing from it is present and future Cuba -real Cuba.) This pictorial identity clearly has its personal dimension, but what makes it conceptually exciting is that it brings together discrepant codes of Cuba.

As William Rubin wrote, "Lam was the first Surrealist to make primitive and ethnic sources central to his art." But Martinez-Cañas is not entirely primitive and ethnic, indicating that she has a more complex sense of Cuban identity than he does. At the same time, the fact that she is primitive and ethnic indicates that she has a more complex sense of Cuban identity than her parents. While her jungle personages are self-dramatizing, suggesting that they are self-representations - a point explicitly made by Yo, 1990 - what is especially important about them is their ingenious combination of opposites: abstract primordial forms, suggesting a surreal essentialization of Cuba, and socio-historically realistic images, from her parents' memory bank of Cuba, as it were. And with this synthesis Martinez-Cañas subtly declares her emotional freedom from both. For while each component has a different physical weight -the abstract totemic figure subsumes the realistic images (it is as though we are looking at an x-ray discoloring its emotional life) -they have the same conceptual weight. Each expressively balances the other, suggesting that Martinez-Cañas, to the extent she identifies with the archaic, savage Lam like forms, distances herself from her parents' memories of a civilized, if troubled Cuba; and to the extent she identifies with the realistic images representing those memories, she distances herself from Lam's frantically mystical, primitive vision of it. She in effect uses each to declare the other obsolete, without denying either. Thus the abstract totems, with their realistic inner life, come to represent Martinez-Cañas in her autonomy, while showing her to be constituted of discrepant Cuban parts.

Martinez-Cañas' personages are monumental, but each is a sum of fragments that does not quite add up to a whole, integral figure. They are completely fractured, however much their parts nominally hang together in emblem-like form. Even in Rumbos de un Pueblo Blanco, 1991, the map is fragmented into a grid whose parts only formally hold together, while the abstractly expressive totemic forms that form the central panel seem to fly wildly apart, in a motion equivocally centrifugal and centripetal. While they have the convulsive beauty associated with Surrealism, their convoluted character suggests that they are held together by a strange force, that, should it disappear, would leave the totems collapsed in a heap, like the broken masks of a forgotten ceremony. In general, Martinez-Cañas' totemic forms are reminiscent of those by Lam, although they are at once less baroque and less delicate (Rubin's word). Indeed, they are positively fierce, and it is this ferocity that maintains their unity, such as it is.

Martinez-Cañas' photographs are in an aesthetic class by themselves in their aura of spontaneity, all the more so by reason of their contradictory geometrical elements. There is a sense that the picture can spontaneously re-arrange itself at any moment without losing such organizational integrity as it has. Selva Mágica I and II, both from 1991, seem to show this re-organization in process. There is something truly maddening about Martinez-Cañas' jungle, which, as we move through it -we seem flung headlong into it- is perpetually changing and surprising us, the perceptual chaos and transient orders within her jungle-the sense of constant reformation within an overarching formlessness- suggests a return to the chaos of experiencing that precedes civilized selfhood, without denying its possibility. Her parent's memories of Cuba are, after all, as true -or as false- as Lam's vision of it. Michael Eigen writes: "It is a relief to be rid of oneself and feel the deeper order unintegrated 'chaos' leads to. In it one senses a groping toward an 'original face'." This original, primitive face not only exists alongside the ruins of one's civilized, consciously formed face, but, in Martinez-Cañas' works, often seem intermingled. In them the original jungle face of Cuba seems part an parcel of its urban, civilized facade, and vice versa.

She achieves this effect by destroying both, and setting the fragments of each free - they are her vocabulary- in what seems like altogether abandoned play. But she maintains firm control while playing vertiginously with the pieces, and is always ready to stop the play when a particularly striking, resonant convergence occurs. The fragments seem to organize themselves in an imaginative, memorable, however tentative, organization, which epitomizes the tension between the opposites rather than reconciles them. In the last analysis her work is about their irreconcilability, without denying that, like parallel lines, they can meet in infinity. (Martfnez-Cafias' destructive attitude is shown by her determined cutting, reshaping, bending, creasing, and marking of the negative, to quote her. But her constructive attitude shows in her sense of certainty when the fragments come together in "the language that I want." The resulting work rarely has any sense of finality, which adds to its force. Each work continues to seem open to change, if decisive in itself. As for infinity, it is implicit in the great amount of open space in her work. However inconspicuous at first glance -but her voids are full of intense, amorphous activity, making them subliminally ominous- her space holds the flat surface of the work as much as the totemic figures and perceptual conceptual shards that panoramically float in and sometimes hurl through it, like magical internal objects that have lost their mooring in psychic space.)

Martinez-Cañas' drama of irreconcilability reaches a brilliant climax in her portfolio of Fifteen Cuban stamps, 1991-92. In this work, fifteen original Cuban stamps are paired with what might be called fifteen "counter-images" made by Martinez-Cañas. the stamps are from pre-Castro as well as Castro Cuba, presenting a kind of panorama of Cuban interests and history. Thus a commercially realistic 1939 "Tabaco Habano" stamp contrasts with a 1970 image of Cuba as an agricultural "Eden," an ironic idealization in view of the hardship of real life in Cuba. Each of these stamps is an artwork in itself. In fact, one made in 1965 reproduces an "Abstraction" by Wifredo Lam, and another made in 1967 reproduces a representation of "Primavera" (Spring) by Jorge Arche, in which idealized lovers recline in an idyllic landscape. In a 1978 reproduction of Amelia Pelaez's "El Mantel Blanco" (The White Coat) a compromise is struck between abstraction and figurative representation. Some stamps show maps of Cuba, tying in with Martinez-Cañas' earlier interest in such maps. Clearly, each stamp has personal as well as social importance for Martinez-Cañas. She then makes each her own in a kind of free fantasy treatment of it, in which she pulls out all the stops of her art.

She takes these secular symbols, each a society's mode of self-conception and self-presentation -the image it presents to the world- and makes them into sacred, enigmatic art, as it were. The face in "La Quinta Columna Te Espia" (The Fifth Column Spies On You), a stamp issued during world war (1943), fragments into an enigmatic collage of Cuban scenes, surrounded by impulsively drawn abstract "images." The stamp, which enjoins one to silence, telling one to keep a secret, is turned into a mysterious image suggestive of the mystery which Cuba is, that is suggesting there is an unfathomable secret to Cuba. Similarly, the 1956 "Virgen de la Caridad" (Virgin of Charity) becomes a mysterious presence in Martinez-Cañas' hands, apparently having more to do with the mystery of woman than with official religion. Indeed, Martinez-Cañas deofficializes the stamps, as it were, by turning them into abstract surreal art. Her portfolio is amazing not only because of the technical ingeniousness with which she effects this metamorphosis, but because of her ability to make the originally simple, straightforward image of the stamp rich with complicated, magical meaning, both formal and emotional. Her re-invented -re-imagined- image is so multidimensional, both physically and conceptually, that it
almost spins out of control. It is experienced more as dizzying vortex of forces than a stable image. Indeed, in destabilizing the original stamp images, Martinez-Cañas suggests the intensity of her own relationship to Cuba, which gives everything about the country existential urgency. Also, while her "take" on the original Cuban stamps is generally surreal abstract, her virtuosity is such that she can use Spanish populist realist style when necessary, as in her treatment of the 1958 "Diario de la Marina." This magnificent portfolio shows Martinez-Cañas art at its most consummate.

Through her dramatic interplay of the two faces of Cuba, Martinez-Cañas shows that photography can convey as intense a sense of primary process and emotional depth as painting, without losing sight of secondary processes, symbolized by the geometrical logic that has its hearing mostly in her maps. Thus, out of the mystery Cuba is to her, and out of the difficult feelings it arouses in her - out of the experiences of Cuba she never had- Martinez-Cañas has made elegantly occult photographs. They convey the sense that what we think of and see is invariably colored by memory and deep feeling, and is thus experienced as simultaneously real and unreal. She shows us that photography can be a record not only of things but of emotional processes, renewing our sense of the mystery of our minds. She shows us that photography, which usually makes us feel at home in the world, can be about our sense of homelessness in the world and ourselves, and our ability to transcend it by fetishizing it in fantasy.

Donald Kuspit © 1997