Maria Martinez-Canas at Catherine Edelman - Chicago

Art in America, Dec, 2003 by Victor M. Cassidy

In the summer of 2002, Fort Lauderdale's Museum of Art held a retrospective exhibition of Maria Martinez-Canas: 110 images made over 22 years. Known for dense black-and-white photomontages created from photo fragments and imagery from books and magazines, her work has drawn on autobiographical and literary sources, and speaks to her fractured identity. Born in Cuba, the artist left the island as an infant and was raised in Puerto Rico. She considers herself an exile.

A few years ago, Martinez-Canas started to use nature imagery in her photomontages. Before her retrospective, she had already moved to more formal concerns and had begun to employ new techniques. Putting identity issues behind her, she entered a realm of pure visual invention. A gallery exhibition earlier this year at Catherine Edelman saw the results: five gelatin silver prints from the artist's "Hortus" series (2001) and 10 Duraflex silver halide prints from her "Naturalia" series (2002). The "Hortus" pictures--black-and-white photomontages of illustrations taken from a 17th-century flower book (Hortus Eystettensis)--seemed transitional. The earliest "Hortus" pieces echo the book format, but the artist loosened up as she continued.

The digital color photos of "Naturalia" are formal pictures with no perspective, consisting of printed plant imagery montaged with leaves, pods, buds and stems from the artist's garden. Martinez-Canas did not think that garden imagery should be black and white, and decided to work in color, abandoning the techniques that she had used up to that point. For this series, she placed her source materials on a flatbed scanner and made black-and-white negatives, which she then digitally colorized. Both figures and grounds are violets and dark purples with touches of waxy green, gold, ivory and silver gray. Martinez-Canas has excellent color control. She was intrigued to discover that the negative of a color has an entirely different character, unlike the predictable reversal she got with black-and-white photography.

Martinez-Canas's true subject is her continuing conversation with her work. By using "unnatural" colors derived from the computer, she distances herself from her sources to create rich, glowingly beautiful images.