Cristina Toledo Exhibition at Camara Oscura Art Gallery

Delusion

The paintings that are brought together in this project have as their background the representation of the mysterious. They can be seen as an incomplete catalogue of apparitions, deceptions and vestiges of other times. Painting is also an illusion that can deceive us, and the sign of something that has taken place at another time. The photographic images that have served the artist as a starting point for these pieces seemed to her to carry hidden meanings, evocative of other past ways of understanding the relationship between the everyday and the supernatural. Bringing them into pictorial language helps Cristina to endow them with another load of meaning and mystery, leaving the final reading as open as possible. Cristina's work articulates a clearly feminist discourse with a revisiting of the presence of women in the history of early photography, and a re-reading of their role from the present. The Victorian era was a time of change and vindication of the civil rights of femininity that marked modernity, and which has survived to the present day. The dialogue that the artist proposes between painting and photography - as artistic media - is fascinating: she literally "paints photographs", appropriating them and giving them a new life.