Nature as a dominant subject in works of art began to appear only in the seventeenth century In the European Baroque era artists demonstrated a sensitivity to the observed world in a way that they had never done before. As art historian Kenneth Clark and other have noted, the landscape tradition of Italy, France, Flanders and Holland was born in the seventeenth century as artists often ceded pride of place to the natural world. No longer was humanity necessarily the critical component the image and indeed in many landscapes artists eliminated the human figure altogether in their works, This was also the era of the rise of the still life. The objectification and analysis of individual objects such as fruits or flowers for their empirical value was raised to a new height in the Baroque period. In the Dutch and, especially the Spanish, traditions of still life, mundane things were examined for their symbolic importance as well. Seemingly simple gatherings of the objects of daily consumption were looked at anew for the iconographic complexity that they might suggest, In Spain such masters as Francisco de Zurbarán, Juan Sánchez Cotán or Juan van der Hamen painted exquisite rendering of cups, bowls, single flowers or
fruits as allegories of the swift passage of temporal life or the glorification of God's majesty and omnipotence. In previous times such things as fruits and flowers were employed but in the function of mankind's hegemony.
The eighteenth century was an age of reason, of the creation of the Encyclopedia and the urge to classify nature was an important characteristic of the age. Artists such as John James Audubon or Luis de Meléndez depicted fruits, flowers or animals in their paintings or prints as if to create a chart of all of nature's possibilities of mutation and change, In the nineteenth century the development of photography greatly facilitated this fascination with the object in nature. Some of the earliest photographs of the 1830s and 1840s were still lifes and individual objects were examined in them with a new degree of objectivity. In her most recent work Maria Martinez-Cañas has brought to this tradition a special sense of irony and poignance. The artist evokes the inherent melancholy of the passage of time The evocative images she has created in her most recent series intimate the cycles of nature based upon the inevitable patterns of decay and regeneration.
This work was born of painful personal experiences. The artist has stated her dedication to addressing issues of mortality and memory after having lived through the death of a dear friend. Caring for him through his agony, she gained a deeper understanding of the nature of inner torment as a metaphor for the human condition and this work bears the indelible mark of someone who has experienced an epiphany. These photographs in their exquisite detail and their highly intimate nature (both metaphorically and in real terms) attests to an acute level of emotional metamorphosis experienced after a dramatic psychological trauma. The type of emotional maturity attested to by these images is one gained only after certain life-altering experiences. In her photographs Martinez-Cañas isolates individual natural elements (leaves, blades of grass etc), examining them with microscopic care in these diazo prints. She empIoys a process akin to blue prints that are used as charts for the creation of buildings by architects. In a profound way, the artist employs her images to create paths for herself to understand the conundrum she has faced by witnessing pain and death. She also constructs in these works patterns or natural building blocks for our own comprehension of her concept of human existence.
This work evokes delicacy and fragility, While some critics have pointed out the differences between these most recent series and her earlier work, I believe that it is more important to see these prints as links in a chain of artistic and psychological continuity. In many of her previous images Martinez-Cañas incorporated maps (in the late 1980s) or postage stamps, as in her series "'Quince Sellos Cubanos" of 1991-2. The idea of a Stamped letter that leaves the hand of the writer to travel great - or short - distances is in itself a symbol of the ephemeral and the fleeting. In the case of Martinez-Cañas's photographs, the stamps were, of course, Cuban - and this fact led the work to take on an even more poignant cast. As a Cuban artist living in exile, Martinez-Cañas sees the connections to the, land of her birth as strong - yet constantly threatened with breakage or fissure.
Other of photographic series by Maria Martinez-Cañas have been based on notions of connections to ancestors and to a continuity of cultural patterns throughout time, Time is indeed at the root of her art and there is, in the end, nothing more fluid and inescapably transient that time.
The artist has emphasized the importance of home and a longing for stability as a powerful undercurrent in her recent art. An integral part of the idea of "home" for her is the garden. The images in her most recent series are derived from her direct confrontations with the plants, grasses and flowers - as well as the lichens and fungi - of her own garden in her Miami home. The garden as a metaphor for the innermost part of one' s personal life as well as a symbol of sanctity is ancient indeed. The Greco-Roman poets lauded the tranquility and refuge found in the garden. Nineteenth century writers such as Emily Dickinson and more recent literary figures like W.S. Merwin, Vita Sackville-West and Katherine Mansfield have found in their gardens the potential for solitary meditation that eluded them in the outside world. They have Written eloquently - as Maria Martinez-Cañas has created powerful visual metaphors of the subject of the necessity of contemplation of the natural world.
The garden in art has been employed as a theme since the Renaissance. Rubens in "The Garden of Love" used the garden as a setting for images of romantic ardor and sensuality. Watteau in the eighteenth century set his symphony to melancholic carnality in the gardens of the mythical Island of Cythera in his greatest composition. But it was the Romantics in the nineteenth century who most fully exploited the notion of nature as a carrier of mood in their art. German painters such as Caspar David Friedrich or Philipp Otto Runge ruminated on transcental values in their pictures in which the diminutive human figures are inevitably engulfed by natural elements. English Romantics such as Turner also used nature in their stormy metaphorical images while other British artists such as Constable were more benign in their approach to the natural world. Martinez-Cañas shares numerous sensibilities with the Romantics (at least in the most recent work) and she has herself stated the links with this aesthetic movement. in many senses, the art of Martinez-Cañas sums up many of the tendencies inherent in the romantic sensibility. A careful reading of her photographs reveals an astonishing poetry amidst her stark confrontations with the observed world.
The recent series of Martinez-Cañas combines the lyricism of the natural environment with a scientific encounter with nature's inner realities, Suggestions of life forces revealed only with the aid of a powerful microscope are evoked in these photographs. Yet beauty transcends the fleeting quality of observed reality and, consequently, the power of aesthetic fulfillment that we perceive in these works, overcomes inevitable decline and decay that is the irrevocable truth of nature.
Edward J. Sullivan © 2000 |
