Language is a sign of the spirit of an era, and of the problems affecting human beings. It is a complex tool, not exclusive of us, that makes us conscious of existing and surviving. It is not a parallel process, but one in consequence with our intrinsic need of being by the interaction with different levels of culture. If we could make a “wordscape,” we would be able to determine the obsessions of each period, stemming from the linguistic nomenclature, the ways in which we communicate and those ways in relation to the contexts of interaction. Some of this has been tackled in Zoom by Mari Claudia García Ruiz.
Her work could be seen as a synthesis of what have been her main concerns for a lapse of almost seven years. But it does not mean a declaration of principles as an artist, but a medium point owing to a before, with this present that is Zoom, and that will continue in any way. It would rather be conceived as a segment of a larger work in progress.
With her stance, certain characteristics of contemporary art are shown, by making use of language with a view to the psychological, the axiological, and part of the cognitive. At the same time, she is interested in pointing out how this has evolved as a form of expression characterizing cultures, societies, social strata and human hierarchies –in this case, focusing in part of our society.
Within this heritage she holds, the objects produced are just a temporary point, and must not be understood as the end of her work. Being her work a much longer process, it is a process of fueling from the sources, “sublimate” them as objects that as they are, express other ideas, and give them back to that social context after a process of selection, comparison, intellectualization, objectualization and re-socialization.
The works she shows are a consequence of her experience and observation as researcher and accomplice. Then, she “plays” with the ravings of society, its illusions and chaos, therefore, certain paradoxes of our reality. They also turn subtle games with what is forbidden but practiced, with the social practice of language that is imposed by undermining false puritanism, and that returns to society as a shot disguised as a caress. After all this minimal aesthetics, clean and lacking unnecessary resources, she parodies the “aesthetics” of the souvenir and the boutique. Behind that apparent cosmetic, Mari Claudia activates sense bombs coming from the same social stratum. Then, she gets inside other means of communication, barely epistolary, cryptic at times, but very responsorial within an urban social stratum. With her objectualization process, she produces another kind of social “engraving” or “scene,” and shows it to us as a collector nourished from the streets, but with much more perceptive tools, than those of some artistic expressions of the so-called “urban” art.
Anyway, she is a manipulator of processes that surround us day after day, of communication tendencies that are there, dripping, enriching in other ways –or not– our linguistic spectrum in opposition to rigidity.
Havana, April 2013.