OUT  OF  TIME  AND  FAR  AWAY
Some words on the work of Maria Cristina Carbonell
Sonia Casanova *

On aqueous humor...

Water, symbol of the unconscious, binding force between heaven and earth, is the element used by María Cristina Carbonell to flood objects and structures as to create a new order from her particular vision.

The first three-dimensional works (1989-1990) are a series of anecdotal brooches executed in silver with figures from a “Last Supper”. In the traditional iconography representations of the Eucharist have been made from tin sheets to embossed silver. In these brooches in particular the diners are changed into figures that swim and dive in blue resin seas. Judas swims under water for a dollar sign, Jesus swims after a heart. Some figures swim in breaststrokes, others trail a shark as a bodyguard, some more wear little swimming goggles with semi-precious stones. A jug pours out the sea.

Aqua, que me muero de sé” (“Water, that I die from thirst”) is the title of her first individual exhibit. Aqua in Latin for the liturgy and sé, that in Spanish can be both sé (thirst) and se (to be). A life to die for and an unquenchable thirst for answers and orientation. Aquatic works: mirrors, brooches and swimming pools were the pieces in the exhibit: Works that are both sculptures and plays upon words. Fantastic assemblages in which humor is prominent and that can be inscribed within the aesthetics of kischt

“The Last Supper” is at the same time the representation of a sacrament, Communion, and the time in the life of Christ when he is betrayed by one of his disciples. The artist looks into the history of Judas Iscariot, history that she interprets as a fight between the heart and treason. In the conceptual work “La Descomposicion de la Ultima Cena” (1991) (“The Decomposition of the Last Supper”), the drama develops in several frames, as in a picture filmed thru the deconstruction of a ready made.

In these, her first works, humor appears as an element that persists and in which she delves as her work becomes more conceptual. Her ideas become more complex and the plays upon words offer clefs for their comprehension.

Regarding birds...

In Tennessee Williams´ Orpheus Descending, the subjects speak of a small blue bird with large, sheer gossamer wings that blends into the blue sky, invisible to predators. This bird sleeps in the air coming to land only when dying. This animal, perfect and extremely free, is for Maria Cristina Carbonell a possible illusion. She knows that living and breathing birds are slaves of an unceasing state of alert. Freedom is the possibility of inventing beasts and forms

The artist has a particular talent for rearing birds, from the nest until they fly away. Once she found a small duckling, lost on a river in the Amazon, she brought this little thing to Caracas where it lived for many years. The bird became a beloved pet and even obeyed simple commands. Adding insult to injury, on one occasion the duck was the victim of a kidnapping: the duck was stolen to be eaten, but its owner paid the ransom. The artist dressed up the duck as an astronaut or covered it with flowers and the animal was the subject of her first videos in which the artist works on the condition of separation and insanity that reappears in her work as lapidary phrases and videos.

Less civilized than the duck the artist has also taken care of two hummingbirds, among other birds. Once freed the hummingbirds returned to the feeding tube with which they were raised. The invisible fluttering of their wings, beautiful and distressing at the same time, was a subject of several films. In Amazilias (1997) the evanescent forms created by the fluttering wings can be seen in slow motion following the changes of direction of the movement.

On footprints…

Since 1993 Maria Cristina Carbonell works on marble, her favorite material until now. At first marble was just a medium for words and concepts, but as she perfects her technique, carving will become her instrument for three-dimensional drawing. The artist works giving priority to sound: the marble answers back the strokes of the chisel with musical notes, showing the artist where to carve, where it is weak and could break and where it is strong and can be struck.

The plays upon words and the humor found in her first works gives way slowly to her preoccupation with nature and death, The word has a larger weight once it is inscribed on stone. Los Libros (1993-94) (The Books) are reflections on vanitas. The artist uses marble books, like those inscribed with the deceased´s name found on burial sites in cemeteries, as a base to write about life.





Each book carries one of a total of nineteen phrases that pose interrogations and metaphores on ways of living, to live in a crystal box from where you can see everything around you but nothing can touch you or to live seeking protection and safety as you feel you are standing on quicksand. The books as a whole constitute a circular narrative that ends with the following phrase: “What do you believe is your price in death?”

Before the medium imposed itself the word was the work. The unceasing work on marble and the thoughts on its perdurability, in contrast to our ephemeral existence, and the solemnity of the message that is saved for history, have influenced since then the artist’s work.

Once again the Christian iconography has sown ideas in the mind of Maria Cristina Carbonell. In 1993 while strolling on the Via Appia Antica, she entered the Domine Quo Vadis Chapel where she found a marble tablet that reproduces the footprints that, according to legend, Christ left when he appeared before Saint Peter as he ran away from Rome and martyrdom.



That same year, traveling in Venezuela´s Orinoco River the artist photographed animal footprints imprinted on the mud of the riverbank. When she returned to Caracas she had them identified by a paleobiologist.

Epicedio (1994) is the conclusive testimony of fleeting footsteps on a riverbank and of a fragile existence. Maria Cristina Carbonell carves the footprints in marble and has them identified with the scientific and common name of each animal, in addition she includes the vulnerability of the species in regards their extinction according to CITES. The first work on this series was the bony hand of a monkey, or from an extraterrestrial being. The remaining footprints, cushy and rounded, are abstract compositions until identified by the text.









In 1998 in Carrara, Italy, the artist perfects the techniques that allow her to approach great marble volumes. From the year 2000 she depicts in stone the fleeting footprints left by a body on a soft surface. Las Almohadas (The Pillows) are marble blocks worked on all sides, their very smooth surfaces have gentle undulations. These heavy blocks give the illusion of lightness.

Each pillow is a blunt piece carefully worked. Nevertheless they were conceived as installations, as an ensemble. Under the title Tras el Amanecer (After daybreak) Maria Cristina has imagined this group of white marble pillows in a living room as a remembrance of lives gone by in fleeting moments, while a video of successive twilights and dawns, with exalted colors, is projected continuously on a screen. Here the imprint is human, the fossil of a posture. Only the mention of the status of these mammals in CITES is missing. Each pillow leads to an individuality, the ensemble is the metaphor of a civilization.

Maria Cristina Carbonell does not work on scale models or with previous sketches since she considers that carving is “drawing in three-dimensions” In Carrara one of her first works was a handkerchief in white marble that seems to wave in the breeze. The artist imagined this work as the depiction of a sail on the Golfo de La Spezia, in Genoa, and as Lord Byron’s farewell to Shelley, who disappeared in the waters of that gulf when a sudden storm sank his ship Ariel. El Pañuelo (The Handkerchief) (1998) marks the beginning of a work on stone that gives the illusion of lightness.

On fossils, bones and scenery

Vanitas is the name given in the XVII and XVIII centuries to the still lives in which full-blown flowers and ripe fruit are depicted. Flowers and fruits that are ready to wilt and rot in decadence depicted side by side with skulls or clepsydras that suggest that what is depicted in the still life, besides being an exercise in pictorial perfection is also a representation of the fleetingness of life.

Maria Cristina Carbonell tackles still life in order to change it with elements of traditional representations. The artist uses cattle skulls divested of flesh by the desert, skulls which she proceeds to cover with stamped plastic cloth. The skulls are lined with this material and she paints over the flowery designs following the original patterns and then covers everything with plastic resin. Ten flowered skulls in two series: Bucolico, five buffalo heads with yellow flowers and Vacolico, five cow heads with red roses, both series from 1993. This is a profound and dark work with a humorous touch, plays upon words and elements of kitsch. Michael Mezzatesta, Head of Duke’s University Museum of Art, in a letter to the artist has accentuated the elegiac character of this work that he has seen in its ensemble as a “forest of skulls” that “suggest the brutality, the struggle and the fragility of our existence with a surprising and daring intense physical presence”



Codes and scenographies of scientific laboratories and exhibits show bones and fossils as cold objects to be studied, stripped of any poetic context. In Au revoir les enfants (1995) the artist shows reproductions of fossil footprints on shelves, accompanied by technical data as in a scientific laboratory. The fossils are false, only reproductions in baked clay tablets, broken in pieces and put back together, in imitation of the meticulous work of a paleontologist. The installation is a large still life and the broken tablets are artistic compositions that play upon our perception.





Clay is the primary element in the preservation of footprints and fossils. Urumaco (1998) represents an exhibit in a Museum of Science. The fossils shown are real and were on loan from the Paleobiology Department of the Universidad Simon Bolivar, Caracas, Venezuela; turtle shells, vertebrae, jaws and giant coprolites. Photographs of distinguished paleobiologists accompanied the exhibit that showed the evidence of a life.



The artist extracts interesting raw materials from nature. With fossils and skeletons she builds still lives; with the feather-shaped blade, or gladius of huge squids that show a luminescence similar to that of marble, she builds a landscape. Landscape of a landscape, (1996) is an angular and fluid composition, inspired by a romantic work by Caspar David Friedrich.


Between 1993 and 1997 Maria Cristina Carbonell travels for long periods on the Upper Orinoco River, reaching the Rio Negro in the confines of the Amazon. There she took white and black photographs, with disposable cameras and no digital intervention. These photographs comprise the series Paisajes dislocados (Dislocated landscapes). As the orientation of the landscape is changed new images appear, arising from the vegetation and its reflection on the surface of the river and the sky, as a Chalice or a rocket in Rocket Nature.

A period of introspection follows her last trip to the Amazon in 1997. The artist analyzes her gaze in a straightforward way: she draws the subtle changes in the expression of her eyes at different times during daytime or night. This series of drawings denote a change in her work towards personal contents.

On Lightness…

El ángulo de la Eternidad (1998) (The Eternity Angle) is a transparent acrylic geodesic dome, in which a marble feather seems to float. This work is homage to the artist’s father.

Between 1998 and 2000 feathers has been a concurrent element in her work. This interest in feathers arises from her knowledge of the feather art of the Yanomami that the artist learned in her Amazon’s travels and her desire to represent flawlessness and lightness as in the perfection of the fluttering wings of a hummingbird. Early on she made pencil drawings of feathers, later she made giclées full of color.

Personal obsessions and scientific knowledge come together in Black Veil (2000) enlarged negative prints of the photograph of a couple and their newborn child: the artist and her parents. The negative print gives the impression of overexposure; you have to look thru it to understand their facial expressions. Maria Cristina Carbonell had just found out that a hormone, oxytocin, played a role in the development of affection and love and as she overexposed an image of familial happiness, she opened a door to the enigma of the role of hormones in human love and affection. The black veil that surrounds the surface of the space ship as it bursts in flames when reentering the earth’s atmosphere here symbolizes the membrane that covers the newborn. The artist appropriates scientific elements and at the same time distances herself from personal experience.

Between the year 2003 and the year 2004 Maria Cristina Carbonell continues working on great volumes of marble, specially the pillows. In unison she works again in other materials as to widen her search: casting of small objects in bronze and aluminum, for example hearts pierced by knives and big pillows with a metallic sheen. She also experiments with modeling clay and begins her experiments with a new medium: video.

The Art of Dealing is the title given to the series of three videos by which the dealings of a strange being are depicted. This apparition is caught on tape as it tries to interact in a world of commercial transactions. This strange being is the artist disguised with a facemask and dressed as a geisha and an elaborate flower arrangement on her head. She walks by street markets and malls. The videos follow the different moods of this being, from hope to frustration and aggressiveness, culminating in a return to the self and inner peace. The trilogy is a reference to the alienation, the distancing from the self required to survive and participate in society.

The creative process is continuous and the work is the materialization of an instant of creation. Maria Cristina Carbonell works with freedom and skill with diverse means and materials creating suggestive forms that turn perception around. The advancement of science and the aesthetic reflection enrich her search on transitivity and the possibility to reinterpret what was thought to be fixed and unique.


* Writer, curator and art researcher. Works for Venezuelan art institutions and museums. Curated the exhibitions Arte en movimiento, 1998 and Reacción y polémica en el arte venezolano,2000 and her writings appear in several catalogues and magazines. Since 2001 publishes exhibition reviews in Art Nexus magazine.span>