Cristina Lama's inner landscape
Cristobal G. Montilla, El Mundo, March 14, 2016

 

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Life is full of collateral circumstances and surroundings without which what really captures our attention would not be understood. This certainty, omnipresent in any corner of human existence, fuels the Surroundings project, which the Sevillian artist Cristina Lama gives free rein to in the JM gallery that Javier Marín runs in Soho in the Malaga capital.

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In this exhibition -which will be open until May 21 and reflects the return of the painter to the same space four years later- the starting point explodes before the paintings 'Landscape, body and path' or 'Tramontana', in which he begins to intuit the storm of contrasts, with the sweetness embracing neighboring lines of tension or drama, which will shake the public along the way.

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Those that have emanated from the most recent production of Cristina Lama are pictorial passages that spring from the interior of the one who captures them on the canvas, but that, in no case, intend to enclose themselves in the individuality from which they are born: «I do not approach the work as a blunt statement, but tangentially, with suggestions and raising questions; if you tell a fictionalized story you condition the viewer a lot”, explains Cristina Lama, who in her intention to keep her approaches open leaves unfinished scenes on the side of the paintings.

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Throughout the exhibition itinerary, the allusions to the most varied elements of the landscape and the contrast of large-format works with tiny pieces is constant. Such is the predilection for the small format in which Cristina Lama's universe unfolds that another of the most forceful sections is sustained by fifty small painted canvases, which come to form, in the words of its author, a set of «sprinkled ideas» in which both the totality and the independent value of each of them make sense.

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On the way to the ground floor of the JM gallery, the only piece made on paper in the exhibition stands out and, once in the basement of the space, the domestic trance contained in the painting 'Around the bed' breaks out. And in its surroundings -excuse the happy redundancy- three paintings that have in common the treatment of the palm tree trace a testimony that suggests, perhaps only in appearance, a forceful triptych.

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