Cristina Barroso belongs to a generation of artists who in the last decades of the twentieth century extended the concept and the territory that art had conquered, and upon crossing these boundaries of modernity, changed the very nature of the work of art.
Her concern turns to the relations of space / time and communicability. Her poetry deals above all with metaphors of territory (geographies and experiences), but also with measurement concepts (accruals and absences), proximity and distance, great excitement or rest, including relations of sociability and conflict.
Cristina works with a great number of materials, including the traditional ones. Her paintings, collages and drawings related signs and signals, maps, with pictorial expressions of patches of color and writings, counterpointing with the apparent rationality of geographical symbols. The patches and writings are
often figurations, actors that establish relations of space, pathways and detachment, even of incommunicability.
The poetics of the cosmos are fascinating, and even the urban maps seem to be seen from space, of a space that escapes our atmosphere. Facing these works, we have a sensation of observing it from far away. At the same time, a conflict in these spaces touches and contaminates us. By confronting them, we feel a sensation of sound, continuous chords and long silences.
There is in some of the exhibited works the aim of emphasizing the physical appearance of the object, of the matter. Objects placed in our world for our everyday living, but the artist sets in them poetic dealing of unattainable worlds that are beyond our possible presence. The first relationship we have with these objects is the closeness and tactile intimacy; however, soon we realize that the work will remain distant, impenetrable, as seen in Network 2009, Number Sequences 2009 and Cidades 2011.
They are disturbing objects, of writings, maps and numbers that speak of our relations with the outside world, as the size of things and towns, or the course of paths that communicate and suggest accessibility but at the same time are works that belong to the cosmic space which is still inaccessible. Eventhough this world gradually reveals itself, we can only enter it through the poetic of Cristina Barroso.
(Translation Luiza Moraes)