Cristina Massena
Unclosed

January 2020

Nuno Grande

Entre #10, 2019,

Tinta (máquina de escrever) sobre papel,

25x50cm

In Cristina Massena’s artistic work there is a discipline that peeks between an unclosed space: architecture. This is not by chance, as that is her formative root, to where she always seems to return in the moment of drawing, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, living… However, another apprenticeship intersects with the previous: music, expressed in the lined way the artist spills her geometric notes, either by furrowing the paper sheet, or by going through the mirrored plan of the metal.

Goethe once stated: “architecture is petrified music”; in Cristina Massena’s case, music metallizes itself, vibrating with light. Her manual drawings prepare some tones of that musical sheet; her “machinist” drawings – because composed with a typewriting machine – mark the paper, reminding the pianola rolls that activate the hammers over the metallic chords, reproducing the musical play. All this, Cristina Massena pours, in the end, over stainless steel plates, and under the shape of blade or pipe profiles, creating sculptures that are after all gigantic musical scores, or, in another perspective, miniaturized cities.

Yes, it is possible to look at these metallic plans, populated with volumes that repeat and alternate itself, and remind us of the drawings and scale models of so many cities dreamed before by other architects: the Ville Contemporaine of Le Corbusier (1922); the Magnitogorsk plan by Ivan Leonidov (1930); the Broadacre City of Frank Lloyd Wright (1932); or even the No-Stop City proposed by the Archizoom collective (1969). A lot of these urban utopias or dystopias from de 20th century were lost in the history of architecture, but always resurge, one and another time, in the contemporary art imaginary, as anchoring critical gestures in the present.

We can imagine ourselves as habitants of these pipes and blades, in the underground or in the piercing emergencies that Cristina Massena patiently soils in the steel metallic surface. In that moment, her sculptures become architectonical models. We can see ourselves, the same way, as reflected narcissus on that steel surface, despite being pierced by its cutting elements. In that moment, her pieces become mirrors of the harms we are all facing in present times.

The unclosed space by the pieces of Cristina Massena lives from that admirable ambiguity: simultaneously musical, architectonic e sculptural, that space is, indeed, a portrait of the way we have been (des)organizing our own urbanity.