The photographs of María Martínez-Cañas are among the most visually and semiotically complex images of our time – and even, one could argue, of the entire history of the photographic medium. They require the kind of sustained attention and interpretation that we are more used to bringing to works of literature than to works of visual art. Quite literally, her pictures need to be read as much as looked at, since their meanings are embedded in both their overall appearance and their individual images, as well as in the interrelationships of these macro and micro levels of looking.

Take one compelling example, a 1990 work called Tormenta de Imágenes (“Storm of Images”): A Picasso-esque, head-like central form with a cyclopean eye in its center is flanked by two bulbous shapes. Within the head form, which seems balanced on a stand, are rows of small photographs, some of which depict scenes from a bullfight while others describe city streets and buildings. Judging by the elements of architectural style, the location could be Spain. Additional photographic fragments suggest the female body and vegetation. Neither the photographic information nor the shapes in which photographs are situated produce an authoritative cognitive response: we are left to puzzle for ourselves the results of their combinations. Our work as viewers requires us to weather the storm of images that the work contains. Still, one might speculate that the head form is female and represents the artist, whose single eye is the camera and whose “contents” or “identity” is comprised of an assembly of artifacts of Spanish colonial culture.

Such pictures are – functionally if not precisely technically – photomontages, and it is within the traditions of Modernist montage that we can find the closest equivalents to Martínez-Cañas’s work. Like the Dadaist montages of George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Hannah Hoch, and Kurt Schwitters, her pictures encompass disparate visual materials within a unified but non-perspectival space. Like them, she often incorporates texts, maps, charts and other “logical” sources of data that refer to comprehensive systems of knowledge. The collage form in effect subverts these systems of knowledge, converting them from concrete and comprehensible forms into something allusive, poetic, and mysterious. And like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Rodchenko’s Constructivist-inspired photomontages of the 1920s, Martínez-Cañas’s pictures imbue the form with personal, psychological content. (Specifically, in Rodchenko’s case, I am thinking of his illustrations for Mayakovsky’s love poem Pro Eto, published in 1923.)

Photomontage (and its sometimes indistinguishable partner, collage) has proven itself an ideal instrument for radical esthetic thinking, political commentary and protest, advertising design, and even pure formalism. Coincidentally, many of the artists associated with its modern practices were at one time refugees, exiles, or expatriates, among them Moholy, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Herbert Bayer, and R. B. Kitaj. Martínez-Cañas has said of her own photomontages that they focus on issues of identity and attempt “to create new memories that have to do with who I am.” The linkage is not hard to grasp. Memory is itself a kind of montage, a fragmentary, selective quilt of impressions and experiences from which we fashion a history of ourselves. What photomontage does is assemble diverse images into a larger, integral whole that has its own identity as an image; memory does much the same, creating an integral sense of identity out of the fragments of the past.

The fragmentary appearance of the photographic imagery within Martínez-Cañas’s photomontage constructions has led some observers to suggest that photographs play a secondary role in her artwork. This conclusion, while perhaps warranted in a purely visual sense, ignores the extent to which photographic information plays a defining syntactical role in her art, much in the way that the texts that underlie her series Imagen Escrita (1994-95), for example, can be read as documents of an era predating photography. Martínez-Cañas’s image-making has two co-equal components: first the recording and gathering of visual details that interest her because of their cultural codes, from architecture to landscapes to pre-Columbian figurines, and then the arrangement and restructuring of these details into the larger, coherent frameworks of her photomontages.

The photomontage technique Martínez-Cañas used until recently is as much a hybrid as the work itself. She begins much like a painter, attaching a piece of graphic-arts material called Rubylith to the wall on her studio and “drawing” on it with a knife, which she uses to sketch the outlines of the work. She then transfers the Rubylith to a light table, where she refines the elements of the drawing, adds in photographic negatives, and strips off parts of the opaque, gelatin layer of the material to reveal its clear Mylar base. The result is a large-scale negative, which can range in size from 11 by 14 inches to five feet high, similar to those used in offset printing.

The artist prints these matrix negatives by contact onto conventional black-and-white photo papers, essentially converting negative collages into positive photomontages. In the prints the clear portions of the matrix are rendered as black; the areas still covered by the red gelatin layer produce white. The camera negatives that are inserted into the Rubylith reproduce similarly; they are chosen from an archive of photographs taken by the artist during her travels in Europe and the United States (but not in Cuba, the titular and mnemonic subject of her work). The shapes and combinations of these inserted negatives are carefully calculated in terms of their formal and associative impacts.

Over the course of her career Martínez-Cañas has developed and refined this technique to the extent that it is now recognizably her own. In her earliest mature work, a series called Fragment Pieces that she started while studying at the Philadelphia College of Art and continued as a graduate student at the Art Institute of Chicago, simplicity prevails. Negatives are simply cut into pieces and repositioned on the photo paper, so that they read much like drawings on a white background. But by 1986, the year of her Fulbright fellowship to Spain, she had begun to make more complex assemblages of negatives to create overall shapes that resemble aerial photographs of islands. This is literally true in the case of Territorio Cubano (“Cuban Territory”), a 1988 work that takes the shape of the island from which the artist’s family comes. These pictures were influenced by the artist’s growing fascination with maps, including maps made by the Spanish explorers who first colonized the Caribbean.

(By now it should be clear that Martínez-Cañas was born in Cuba, a biographical fact that usually is mentioned at the beginning of any discussion of her art. I have resisted pointing this out until now because her work is not merely autobiographical, or even particularly about being an exile. Her situation is more complicated and her art more allusive than polemic. Further facts: she left Cuba as an infant in the company of her parents, who fled the Castro regime in 1960 and moved to Puerto Rico, where Martínez-Cañas was raised. She moved to the United States to attend art school at age 18.)

From this point in her career, the idea of Cuba, as a site of cultural memory and of personal fantasy and imagination, becomes Martínez-Cañas’s principle subject. In part this may have been occasioned by her decision to move to Miami, where she has lived since 1986 in a neighborhood composed of large numbers of Cuban exiles, but it also stems from her fascination, during her year in Spain, with an archive of maps and documents relating to the Spanish colonization of the New World. In 1991 she began the series that most directly speaks to her distance from her parents’ homeland, Quince Sellos Cubanos (“Fifteen Cuban Stamps”), which consists of photomontages that borrow their shapes and forms from specific Cuban stamps – including reproductions of paintings by influential Cuban artists such as Jorge Arche, Wifredo Lam, and Amelia Peláez. These homages to Cuba’s largely unknown artistic culture put Martínez-Cañas on the map of contemporary art in the 1990s, a decade in which many artists were seeking to reflect on their cultures of origin and on the sense of displacement they experienced while living in the United States.

The artist’s feelings of emotional connection to the work of Wifredo Lam, a Cuban-born Surrealist painter who lived in Spain and France in the 1930s, is apparent not only in the Cuban stamp piece based on his work but also in the series of Totems she produced between 1989 and 1992. Taking their cues from Lam, these tall, narrow montages – some with white backgrounds, others reversed – simultaneously resemble tree trunks, spinal columns, and decorative poles used in African rituals. Their design minimizes the impact of the photographic images appearing in them, although the Totems continue to include references to colonization and the Spanish past.

Subsequent bodies of work, such as the Piedras (“Stones”) series, show Martínez-Cañas growing in ambition and the works themselves growing in overall complexity. It some cases the complexity is formal, to the extent that the meanings of the images are rendered almost impenetrable by the intricacy of the excisions and inclusions in the negative matrix. In other cases the complexity rests as much on the layering of data and detail, as in the Imagen Escrita (“Written Image”) series mentioned earlier, in which photographs of objects and scenes from the colonial and pre-colonial eras partially obliterate antique documents related to trade between the old and new worlds. At the same time she was working on Imagen Escrita, the artist also produced her largest and most public work to date, Años Continuos (“Continuos Years”), a forty-foot wall of glass panes onto which photographic images were sandblasted; it was installed at the Miami International Airport in 1995.

In the past five years Martínez-Cañas’s work has taken a new and surprising direction, although it clearly is related to her earlier photomontages. The first signs of this new direction appear in two suites of pictures, titled Flight (Hospital Bed) and Prima Materia, both from 1998. The Flight images each show a ghostly white trace of a female figure curled up on a grid or “quilt” of rectangular pictures, some of which look like botanical specimens. The Prima Materia pictures are photograms, or camera-less images, also of specimen-like subjects drawn from the natural world, albeit overlapped and layered. While alluding to culture, and specifically to the project of collecting physical evidence as a way of understanding the world, these pictures are much less geographically focused than her earlier work.

Her even more recent works, bearing titles like Traces of Nature and Naturaleza Perdida (“Lost Nature”), are identified as unique diazo photograms – that is, cameraless records of objects placed on or near sensitized, blue-toned paper to create what photographers call cyanotypes. In most cases the objects that created the shapes are ambiguous, but their shadowy afterimages are beguiling. Some have the look of microscope views of single cell plants and animals; others suggest dancing pairs of genetic material. In any case, the images are free of direct references to maps, documents, artifacts, or any other signs of culture. Formed by what is essentially photography’s most primitive manifestation, these works look toward the natural world as a source of identity and identification.

As different as they are, however, Martínez-Cañas’s latest photographs remain rooted in her quest to define her own place in the world. While eschewing the verisimilitude of the camera lens, and thus any obvious signs of cultural distinction or difference, they embody a “primitive,” elemental approach to photography that metaphorically captures the essence of the medium. In similar fashion, these photograms could be said to be the essentialized versions of the photomontages – which are themselves photograms to the extent that they are made directly through the agency of light. As with the montages, the photogram images appear in a space without perspective or depth, so that they are free to float away from any mooring in the observable external world. Like memories, they create a fictional space out of real, concrete materials.

In removing photography from its moorings in the observable world, Martínez-Cañas has allied herself with a current generation of artists who consider description and lenticular representation to be optional rather than essential aspects of the photographic transaction. What makes her career unique is that she adopted this attitude early on and has kept to it consistently ever since. But as this mid-career survey demonstrates, her way of viewing photography as a graphic, expressive medium is more than an esthetic option or theoretical position; if anything, it has been an artistic necessity compelled by a quest to resolve feelings of displacement and exile. Those feelings involve history but also have their own history. In her newest work, forms created by the artist herself have replaced fragments of lost cultures and a disappearing cultural heritage. This work suggests that identity ultimately is not just a receptacle of one’s past but something generated by the activity of re-creating the past in the present – as memory and as metaphor. •

Andy Grundberg © 2002