...

A smoked

"You shall not do for yourselves a work of sculpture or a figure ... You shall not adore them nor worship them." Moses.

Immersed in cultural or commercial projects, in "temples" or outside them, ignored in local contests and in pursuit of the "strange" (but "redeemer") prophet; after commendable struggle to legitimize themselves as an artist while celebrating the origins of the "prodigious material", and among them, Martha Jimenez Perez.

Martha is presented to us as a sculptress who, to her personal taste, molds the clay, in a theme that spreads the pupil of the "other" and within which she manages to shape her own vision of the Cuban, from sympathetic attitudes that surpass the picturesque, as if she intended to sift cultural essentials, now, in a progressive spatial dimension: of the first investigations about characters of local historical evasion, given its marginality and despite its irreplaceable cultural place; has passed, almost intuitively, to a translucent Latin Americanism in the symbolic inclusion that enriches its iconography; (The corn, the horseshoe, the grasshopper, the crucifixes ... and other artifices); and that in their entirety, they problematize points of an "agenda", greater than traditions, beliefs, ethnicities or mere everydayities.

From the text identifier of each piece, shows passion and nonchalant linguistic respect; to the voluminous, sensual and humorous bodies; the spectator is tied to the long and morbid desire to touch the borders: from passive observer to owner; a labyrinth to transit has been left open and inescapable; by it have to pass the producer, the work and the consumer (possibly predator). In tantalizing ways, divided by steps, Jimenez maintains an ethic by conviction that is unmistakably transposed in the product here exposed, so that in the paradoxical behavior of the "other", the recipient feels the aesthetic enjoyment of this proposal.

Like Victor Manuel, Martha knows the key; "One must be a child of his time, but not a bastard."


By: Marcos Tamames Henderson
19 December 1996