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Densely carnal

Once again, Martha Jimenez dares the difficult game of poetry and narration without words, with the pure and undulating matter of feminine forms. This sample of her peculiar way of penetrating the Cuban is a confirmation more of a way of saying that, without a doubt, she has found her special place in the arts of the Island.

Femininity, in these twenty pieces of surprising expressiveness, is shown with strength and the airy, fleshy and deeply human volume, that make of the style of Martha Jimenez such a special case, in our artistic medium, for her ability to capture a special beauty, densely carnal, deeply rooted in the truth of experience: the artist, therefore, seems to have found the same secret route that, at the time, made Botero a man of all times. Martha Jimenez, in fact, moves towards the universal truths, in particular those of gender, starting from an indelible root to the essential land of Cuban culture.

But do not be fooled by the appearance of manners and easy smile. There is an essential irony, a sharp word, in these figures, which allude finely to the time concealed by contemporary life which, from its refined and artificial parameters of beauty (so strange in the deep to the urgent native women that Martha Jimenez rescues forever), she seems determined to deprive us and to challenge the artist (the artists) to the difficult feat of creating without renouncing the persistent fervor of the brief days. Time, the actual intensity of existence, are overlapping themes in these statuettes. Time, the tenacious and invincible idiosyncrasy of the Cuban, art as a subject of itself, women in their exact and intensely tactile profile, the triple integration of tradition, contemporary existence and the creative imagination, form perhaps a good part of the magic, at once poetic, plastic and reflective of the works of Martha Jimenez.

  
By: Dr. Luis Alvarez Alvarez.
November 29, 2000