She is already into the path of her delirium. She is a painter. The ancient face, the modern face, the future face, the faces that identify her. She has her own style. The drawings sustain themselves and then, the color of the educated imagination. I knew it since the first sight, 1998, with the paintings, just, paintings, art, strength of expression, the multiple marvelous faces of Cristina Núñez, the painter.

Guillermo Morón (2003)
Writer and historian

The paintings of Cristina Núñez propose that things are happening, but nothing is really happening, they are only situations or just “paintings”; they are images created by the sole pleasure of imagination, being, each one, a world in itself. In the painting practice, the idea absorbs the artist and only when the work is done, she rests. Finished painting, closed situation, because she does not have perfectionist keenness, neither does she get obsessed. Her greater satisfaction is to start a new icon that would rest on itself. The titles of her paintings only identify the pieces; the titles just place the work in a particular moment.

I started the conversation with Cristina Núñez and she tells me about her admiration for Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918), and her predilection for the bossa-nova. It would be simple to relate her to the Freudianism of the paintings of the Austrian Master or to the waving sensuality of the Brazilian music: these are just clues and anecdotes in which a young creator of situations like her creates her paintings.

The origin of her very particular world, goes back to 1997, when, surprisingly, as she was drawing, the triangular faces, which are the “leitmotiv” of her work, appeared; men, women and asexual characters. From then and until now, these faces have not abandoned her and that “plastic gossip” remains and work as an excuse to create spaces, colors and textures. The open or closed eyes of those faces are just lines or points, the opaque or bright faces appear only in the plastic aim of the artist. The characters are dressed with long, antique ropes, sometimes with accessories, due to the capacity to contain pigment and texture and they are justified just in chromatic and plastic terms. Surrounding these intimate beings, there are musical instruments, furniture, suitcases, sacks, book shelves, domestic animas…, they are all part of the situation, which separated, could become a still life. All depends on the way you look at the poetic world of the painter.

Captivated by the situations of her characters, Cristina offers to us her plastic world of “fictions”, of imagination that come close to the gothic art, just to give it a name or a clue to the understanding of this captivating world to which, not even her creator gives it a name; she does not think it to be necessary. I make reference to this ancient time just to be within a no-naturalistic realism that appears in the characters that are surrounded by details, spaces, clothes and objects in places and extensions which are there and that are not fruit of the imagination of dreams or longing. Her paintings are at her scale and they also could be a prolongation of the space in which she lives. Jorge Luis Borges wrote: “… los demiurgos amasan un rojo Adán que no logra ponerse de pie; tan inhábil y rudo y elemental como ese Adán de polvo era el Adán del sueño que las noches del mago habían fabricado”. (Las ruinas circulares)

Carlos Maldonado-Bourgoin (2003)
Member of the Art Critics International Association.
AICA, Venezuelan Chapter.