Artist | Cristina Gonzalez Studio

INSTALLATION & PUBLIC WORKS

These installations and commissions designed for public space hold deeply researched, complex, visual narratives. They tell layered stories unbound by linear time: stories that weave together past, present, and future. The dominant shapes—tree foliage, plants, clouds, birds—coupled with cast light and shadow, suggest a dynamic and generous world. Where possible, I use an immersive scale so that viewers can physically and metaphorically locate themselves inside the work. In all instances pictured here, Mesoamerican history, forms, belief systems, materials, and/or literature serve as a primary source for my research and a vital inspiration for the work as a whole.

APAPACHANDO LA MATRIA

WORKS ON PAPER

Alongside the gathering of words and images, drawing will forever be at the heart of my studio practice. I use it as a question-based assembly, a tool for thinking and for the collecting and assembly of thoughts. It is both inquiry and imagination. A conjuring. Many of my drawings are in sketchbooks, journals, and scraps of paper. Others become short series in and of themselves. In 2015/16, I started drawing on amate, the sacred and ritualistic bark paper from Mexico upon which ancient codices were written. Produced from a species of ficus, amate carries secrets in its DNA, reminding me to be gentle and to treat the skin-like paper as kin. Amate is a physical and conceptual ground where I bring ancestral history into dialogue with the present.

CUT PAPER

Papel picado is a traditional, Mexican decorative craft made by cutting elaborate designs into sheets of tissue paper. There is humility, simplicity, and delight in papel picado. It forever reminds me of my mother, who loved the folkloric México-mágico of her childhood and subsequently shared this love with my sister and me. In this body of work, I innovate on papel picado to depict immersive, fantastical landscapes.

PAINTINGS

My training was as a painter in the tradition of Western European oil painting. We studied Cézanne as the father of modern painting as much as we studied his French and Italian forebears. My work synthesizes formal attributes of this tradition—carefully modeled figures painted from life, or, say, deep pictorial space—with the folkloric colors, patterns, spaces, and bodies of my lived experience. I use painting to summon a lush and generous world of female power.