Fabric Archive, Textile Painting
The fascination of Marina Cruz with clothes has been sentimental, lost in the reverie of recollection but also keen to hold objects up for the attentiveness that survival deserves. This makes her relationship with clothes -- worn over time and salvaged from it -- something more than just to indulge nostalgia. It is more properly a longing: that which recovers -- and then renews -- ties to that which has preceded and to that which has been found to last. Ancestry and presence shape the structure of the desire. But this desire sublimates, like the mothballs that impede the entropy of things, the thriving of mold, the release of oxidation.
There are many aspects to be gleaned in this situation of reverie and attentiveness. Surely, there are the clothes of her forebears, artifacts not only of everyday necessity, but also of style and appearance, a distinct constellation of patterns, systems of skill, designs. Then there is the place where these have been kept, neatly folded, stacked up, made to stand the test of the years and alongside other belongings. There is as well the larger architecture of the house and the more specific room. And finally, the painting. How does this kind of painting speak to the task of memory?
This must be the dynamic that makes the series of Cruz possible. Investment in the surface of the clothes is key. It is the object, and it is portrayed longingly for its details. But it is not mere object. It is some kind of craft, both the clothing and the painting. These materials or materializations partake of a certain kind of devotion to ornament, to the intricacies of facture.
In many ways, what Cruz does is to render the clothes in miniature but on the scale of large painting. This miniaturist sensibility implicates the ways by which she references domestic life that is largely inhabited by women, sheltered by women, clothed by women. And so, home and woman form a robust context here as it had been in her previous sorties. But what this new series introduces is age, the ageing of both cloth and woman. It is in this ambience that painting investigates and cites traces of attrition of the material. It is likewise in this atmosphere that the artist tries to imagine the childhood, for instance, of her mother, of how history has intervened to transform the body into something else. The comparison between the child and the mother intrigues her. This is a telling pause of remembrance because it is evoked by some kind of a shell, a mold of an erstwhile body that has overcome the confinement. And yet, the vessel persists to serve as an index of the presence. It is this index that Cruz paints, an index that is further dissipated by adornment and the evidence of wear and tear.
A device that is discernible in this series is the close-up that ensures a micro view of the fabric that is made inevitably vulnerable by the passage of the seasons and most probably the humidity of the environment. Traces of fraying, stains, deep creases, faded patches, states of threadbareness, signs of being well-worn. These intimations of unraveling and of the loss of integrity of the thing that is the cloth make painting relevant because the art is prompted to be aware of certain characteristics of the material and the forces through which these characteristics are concretized. Without doubt, there is paradox here between the object of painting that is old and the instinct of painting that is current. How does Cruz come to terms with the urgency of looking back and the need to root contemporary talent in the realm of memory?
The micro perspective, however, does not settle, or even languish, in some inert or static order. Cruz pulls out of this microcosm, as it were, to reveal the circumstances of care in which clothes are collected in cabinets. It is at this point that we are reminded of the social life of these clothes as alluded to by the ways of their upkeep. What comes to the fore is the interaction between the heritage of fabric, variously reckoned as antique or vintage, and the performance of painting that depicts it in the present. The question that may be asked of the artist is this: What is it that painting registers? Is it just the object or its historical life? If it were the latter, then painting might endeavor to do more, or might be required to breach its customs. And Cruz has taken risks to insist on the craft cosmology of the clothes by threading into the canvas and embellishing paint with embroidery. She has cast actual clothes to configure mannequins, toy-like resemblances of figures in their finery. She has also laminated photographs and annotated them with texts. In other words, Cruz has ventured beyond the expectations of painting and has sought other means of mediating the memory of clothes. She has done this by laying bare the technology of both cloth making through needle work and the constitution of womanhood itself through the restyling of the dress or subjecting it to textual elaboration as if it were an archival possession.
At some moment in the process, the strands of the project of Cruz come together. And the gathering of the elements may well form the language of the expression. Textile emerges from the impulse of making, of weaving, of fabricating. From this labor comes the narrative, or more apt to say, the fiction, the weaving of history and personal tale, of genealogy and anecdote. And metonymy, too, as attire becomes cipher of shoulder or vector of navel.
The challenge for Cruz in the future might be to complicate the procedure of painting itself so that the realism or the expressionism does not take over as the main technology of perception or of intuiting memory or of conjuring the figure in visual space. She can speculate on the limits of the current form and maybe even revisit her forays into abstraction in the earlier phase of her practice. The extension of the sensitivity to the sculptural is telling and may, in fact, point to directions beyond painting. In this regard, the miniaturization of the fabric through the swarm of detail finds a cognate articulation in the figurine of the dress or the house. If pursued with cogency and inflected with the artist’s signature wistfulness, her project should be able to acquire a spatiality that is much needed to widen the latitude of all these: painting, memory, woman.
