December 2020

Bernardo Pinto de Almeida

Cristina Massena (Porto, 1977) is a sculptress that has been affirming herself recently in the new Portuguese art scene, and whose work addresses the, sometimes antithetical, questions between the constitutive materials of the sculptural work and the later forms that it can acquire, transforming its most evident meaning. Her work starts from some reflections previously collected in minimalist poetics, namely the rawness of the naked presence of materials, to now question the way in which form reinscribes matter with another (and new) meaning, namely giving it, suddenly, new communicative possibilities, and even a differentiated presence. A work of enormous elegance and delicate suggestion, hers thus addresses issues immediately linked with tension, in certain cases, and the adequacy, in others, of the way in which the materials get closer, playing among them, and building brief webs of meaning that far transcend the logic of oppositions. Thus, starting from a matrix that was once bound to Donald Judd and Carl André, of letting the materials be freed in the disclosure of their own spatial poetics, closely linked to that typical geometric economy of the minimalist heritage, her work, however, inscribes other possibilities, which are linked not only to the joint use, and without apparent opposition, of various textures (iron, wood, etc.), but also to various forms, usually geometric, to emphasize a kind of abstract form in which the behaviour of materials accentuates a vital aspect. Thus, for example, when the arrival of textured forms of rust, seems to redraw, on the raw nudity of iron, figures that are almost evanescent, but loaded with pictorial memory. It is precisely the way in which we witness this becoming, characteristic of, we could say, natural transformations, like oxidation – the unexpected element that gives its forms a sense of unexpected vitality –, that accuses the possibility of form becoming a space of reception of the metamorphosis and transcendence of what was, before, purely material order, to become almost a sensitive matter.