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Artistic career |
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When she got her degree, in 1961, her
artistic job, after a brief incursion in abstraction, connects to
figurative movement. In her portraits and urban landscapes whose
characteristics are the flat treatment of shapes, we can perceive
expressive values that will be constant in her artistic proceeding: colour,
light, notion of structure and consequently of shape, space, rhythm and
composition. Subjectively, in a more conceptual level. María-José always creates in her works.
Her Art is fed of impressions, and as we will see all along her artistic
production, even when she starts from her close setting she didn’t only
imitate her surrounding reality, but each figure-shape-sign goes through
her interpretation’s filter.
During the seventies, María-José presents
in Barcelona exhibitions with constructivist works. They are pieces whose support are wood’s boxes. Its tops
are distorting glasses or painted by her. Into the boxes there are several
objects (bulbs, egg boxes, etc.) giving a value to depth as a pictorial
and plastic special shape. *There is a certain relationship with poor art,
as she uses found or smashed material.
By the end of the seventies, she carries out
some things of Pop-Art because, as they are objects of the consumer
society and popular culture, they are reflected in her canvas (Telefónica’s serie) as a social protest which is connected to
atmosphere’s period* Nevertheless, she will come back
very soon to the flat shapes of her first figurative language until ending
in a lyric abstraction. Outlines of her forms are not then so strong and
they are dissolved going into an abstraction based on the characteristic
language of stain in chromatic dissolution and of spatial experience.
María-José introduces to formative process
of her works new material and new technical proceedings because she is
becoming interested in standing out the quantity of text and atmosphere of
her surfaces.
It’s in the eighties when she goes into
the material abstractionism that she won’t give up until now.
She uses natural pictorial pigments,
sometimes applied in its pure state, sometimes mixed with oils,
agglutinants, varnishes, etc. She adheres to pictorial surfaces, extra-pictorial
material like powder, concrete, metallic fillings, wires, pieces of metal,
ropes, wax, sawdust of shaving’s wood, rusty iron, plastic material,
woods, beams, objects of daily use (in general related to mechanics and
nautical fields), etc.
These non-pictorial elements and objects are
introduced to the work through collage and assembly.*
She also uses graphics or sewing procedures,
among other, to stand out numeric quantities.
All along her artistic production she does
continuous and brief incursions into sculpture’s world. In the nineties
this interest is strongly reasserted.
Nevertheless, her continuous research of what is new, coexists with the
remains of the past, and in fact her sculptures are found objects (again
there is a relationship wit poor art) that she manipulates in a pictorial
way and they turned into sculpture-paintings. Material becomes a work’s art capable to emotion and to produce
sensations.
It represents a return to classical forms that María-José needed to realise and to reflect on her canvas. It is a study of the work of this great master of the 500. As a conclusion, we reaffirm that in each one of her
pieces there is an important relationship between "shape-material"-
material and technique- and "shape-content" (1), because her
personality, as a "pure creative will", is never abstracted from
the situational and historical context she lived. Her experiences,
thoughts, feelings, ideals and belief are in continuous dialogue with
material, looking for interior coherence of work per
se and in relation to the global whole of all of her production, with
expressive constant values and, at the same time, continuously renewed.
Laura Rossignani
(1) Umberto Eco, La Definición
del Arte Graduated in History of Arts. |
