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Portrait of woman

Better than in luxury hotel,
Stay on this site;
Here you will find plenty
What you will not find there.

N. Guillen.

For those who are familiarized with the saying of Martha Jimenez is known the need to sharpen the senses if you try to catch what is beyond her work and is, after every detail, however simple it may seem; Martha, as if she persisted in revealing herself to be a faithful disciple of Nicolas Guillen, knows how to tell stories of frank cultural solidity. Portrait of Woman, as in the exhibitions of previous years, treasures a cosmogonic world that only can be from a certain altruism before the subaltern culture, that wich, on the way to what theorists call counterculture, validates its own canons or behavior patterns under the most important and transcendent sociocultural acts.

But what is significant in Martha's poetics, the particular, which enhances every piece of the whole, is the frankness and simplicity to reveal the rumors of everyday life. Every observer, even specialized criticism, will allude to a theme, a motive, and even locate its production in relation to the coordinates of the contemporary work both on the island and in the international arena because, indisputably, the work of Martha forms part of it; but for this occasion I prefer to invite you to search, to inquire from every sign used, the testimony of a woman, a geographic space and a time. No matter from what angle we approach but we can not deny the presence of a woman whose femininity unfolds in coquetry and courage to assume the surrounding reality with the air of pre-established triumph, as if authority and firmness would put an end to that feeble concession of fragility to which the genre has often been condemned.

In the same way, each element gives away the geographical space in which one enjoys the life, it is enough to look at the rich iconography to discover woman of islands, woman of the insular Caribbean, woman who borders the mainland without totally embracing her. The challenge is a matter of the temporal contextualization, of discovering in each attire the testimony of a past that resists being annulled; a present in which the recognition or legitimacy of certain details is debated; And even the proposal of a duty in times to come.

Portrait of Woman corroborates the clear interest to look with transparency, from the art, the nuances of two universes that merge into one: the interior of this woman and the cultural horizons that come before her, stop and are marked by how much stationary they have for her. You also have the option to choose, to reconcile with the gestures printed on these pieces or to reject them definitively, in any case, it will be an unspeakable dialogue and hardly surpassable in what it has of honesty.

By: Marcos Tamames Henderson
July 2006