MARIA MARTINEZ-CANAS
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
So I didn’t immediately recognize Canas as the creator of the black-and-white collage prints now on view at the Catherine Edelman Gallery, though the pieces seemed vaguely familiar. After seven years of hard work, Canas has made great changes in her content and technique. Whereas the old works were restrained, almost minimalist, the new works fairly explode with detail. They combine abstract shapes with fragmented images from architectural photography. But the sharp, spiky lines and stark black-and-white patterns of her previous photographs remain–the same qualities that captured my attention years ago. Fascinating as the old works based on music were, however, ultimately they were inaccessible because the sources of the photographic images were unidentifiable. Canas’s current works focus on a personal search for her Cuban heritage; they are not only formally vigorous but emotionally expressive.
Canas’s photos combine the gestural freedom of drawing with tiny camera-made images to produce prints that from a distance look almost like pen-and-ink drawings. The white, razor-sharp outlines of tree trunks, palm fronds, and saber-tooth shapes are filled in with dots, dashes, and random scribblings, or by little pictures of Spanish-looking streets and buildings. To integrate these diverse elements without rupturing the seamless photo surface, the artist creates a sort of master negative. Using an X-acto knife, Canas cuts various shapes and designs out of Rubylith film. (Areas of photo paper covered by Rubylith will not allow light to pass. Once the paper is developed, those areas will be an unexposed white.) The Rubylith shapes are laid on a sheet of clear plastic. Canas then tapes snipped pieces of regular black-and-white film negatives to non-Rubylith areas of the plastic surface or blots these areas to create textured patterns. The master negative is then pressed against a piece of photo paper, exposed, and developed.
The show also includes a few small photographs made six to ten years ago. Oddly, these extremely minimal pieces are more aesthetically challenging than the current magnificently detailed chefs d’oeuvre: they don’t look the way we expect photographs to look. A couple of untitled pieces from 1984 are especially intriguing. Reduced merely to several thin lines plus a delicate arc and only a whiff of unrecognizable photo detail, these pictures remind me of the kind of drawings Russian Suprematist painter Kazimer Malevich or Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy might have made earlier in the century.
