Since the time of Greek sculpture, western art has been living with nostalgia. This is due to that loss of classical harmony which can still be found in archeological museums, in statuary art and in the remains of the temples scattered throughout Hellas.
Classical art par excellence was this, an epiphany of perfection expressed through an understanding between thought and matter and the surpassing of concept carried by the form. In the same way the temples were the result of a project which concerned investigation into the territory, geography of the ground and knowledge of the atmospheric elements. Everything converged in the construction and so architecture was the synthesis of a mingling between the constructed and the pre-existing nature.
As we know, after Classicism, Hellenism became the dominating culture of a memory carrying harmony and perfection of statuary and of classical Greek architecture. Hellenism is in itself international expansion, spreading beyond the Hellenic territory. It is a cultural attitude meeting other cultures and arriving finally to the positive cross-breeding of Greek-Roman art.
This means that we have always been living immersed in post-modernity which is the fruit of contamination and citation, the recognition of other interwinded cultures, a further sign of an enlargement of boundaries and of communication stretched beyond every autarchy. Contemporary art is in itself the expression of an anxiety without limits, of a desire for trans-national exchange, the assimilation of others’ codes arriving to a kind of cleptomania of third world styles. The taking on of African art by Cubism for example, of bricolage in Dadaism, of popular art in abstract art which theorizes the total art work.
Therefore modernity and post-modernity end up being parallel convergences of a cross-eyed culture rich in results going beyond the specifics of a historical Avant-garde and of the new Avant-garde which has adopted the method of cross-breeding and of interaction of subjects as a stable strategy.
Maria Cristina Crespo has founded her creative method on this attitude, and in this way has created a truly “iconographic theatre” in which characters and interpreters emerges from citations and returns to literature, figurative art, philosophy, religion and popular fables. Everything being touched by a fantasy which arrives at a virtual use of history.
In her Gibellina’s atelier works, as in all her works, Crespo uses varied materials to realize theatres of grotesque astonishment, able to guide spectators view inside the perspectives of a miniaturized, imaginative and labyrinthian space.
The works of this Roman artist spring from the sedimentation of an articulated sensibility which pass from an innocent creative viewpoint to a fully aware of maturity one.
This hybridism is the result of her cultural history and background, but is also a personal choice, moving beyond the limits of the frame or of any kind of border and approaching a free and total space where the genres meet and communicate with each other.
There isn’t any purism in the works of Crespo, no formal laboratory techniques, she is rather searching for an image epiphanic intensity which is always the result of a meeting.
Genres and languages speak with each other following the precepts of that sense of omnipotence that only childhood and art possess. Crespo is inspired by Romantic, she knows how to mix high culture and low culture, northern European fables and Mediterranean climate, grotesque and sublime.
The works titles always belong to the sublime sphere, referring to a historical and cultural distance contemplated and harpooned by desire. Desire is transformed into citation that capsizes into the present formal clippings and iconographic precepts.
To live in the present the sublime must absolutely assume the tone of the grotesque, i.e. the actualization of a past otherwise not liable to a faithful citation.
Crespo’s language infidelity is tormented with longing which seems to filter, through subjectivity, the objectivity of many cultural stories. Strong is the effort of the subject, of the creator “I” of a work that must contain regression and quick recovery of the present.
For this reason, Crespo’s work is never nostalgic, the mark of the grotesque follows through all her production like a memory transferred into the reality through the assumption of a constant tone of a fabler.
The delight of the story-telling is tempered by the lucid adult realization of the artist. She bathes every composite iconography in the distorting temperature of an almost northern European style and a surely expressive one.
Each composition seems to take the formality of a popular puppet theatre, like the Sicilian “Theatre of Pupi”, able to translate the sublime in delicate marionettes of the present. The sense of playfulness moves Crespo creative process. However, she doesn’t want to infantilize the culture but rather model it into a present-day measure, in the direction of a pocket-size subjective memory.
The most varied materials are condensed and gathered in her small wooden boxes –measuring from 20 x 30 x 15 cm. to a maximum of 70 x 100 x 15. Wood, stucco, clay, papier mâché, various metals, cloth, paper, tin foil, artificial flowers, lace, costume jewelry, found objects, recycled materials, flaxen or silk threads, treated polyester, cork, are the materials making up her iconographic universe. She creates her characters with stucco, iron wire and nylon intertwined like the old Egyptian did with mummies; her relief landscapes are made using a technique similar to the Egyptian technique of cartonnage.
Boîte en valise of a memory which naturally does not forget the irony of contemporary art.
That one which goes from the transportable dimensions of Duchampian Dadaism, from the surrealism of Ernst up to the boxes of Cornell.
In the small and medium dimension the creative process is set off by implosion which unites far apart cultural worlds, different iconographies and divergent types of citations.
Association and condensation support the fantastic pollution of Crespo, who apparently want to reproduce in this small dimension the dense and ferocious childhood fantasy.
In this case however the art is fruit of a technique and therefore of a linguistical elaboration, an adult application of an educational process in no way instinctual or primitive.
Orderliness is necessary when the house gets small. The compartment is restricted in an architecture almost pocket-size. The form adult arrangement necessarily wins in order to get to the formative act.
This act is the result of an intense technical work. A weaving together of her manual ability with paintings and objects, the manipulation of figures not only painted but realized three-dimensionally on the small stage of the piece.
The figures have the dignity of presences dressed in their own actual clothes, ready for an unerasable performance.
For this reason they have on themselves the dignity of their clothing, the clothes of a special occasion, that of an internal dialogue between them, that externally produced directed to the spectator. From this point the inevitably social destination of the work can be deduced, it is open to the contact with the public and ready to tap attention and contemplation.
Profound is the scene produced by Crespo, constructed according to the fundamental rules of depth perspective which receives the space of the story like a river-bed or a protective storage depot. In some way such depth also seems to protect the image during its eruption into the present.
The depth perspective is, obviously, the recognition of history springing from the artist’s conscience that oppose her construction to the bi-dimensional spectacularity of our present. In fact the spectator’s unused eye finds itself facing the discomfort of sinking into the interior of the scene, in the spatial situation which condenses inside itself the various planes of the image.
A tuning in is created from this discomfort, fertile provocation created by the work, and the grotesque released by it. So it is the meeting of a double effort: create and of contemplate, artist and public, artwork and social body.
Therefore the grotesque is not a simple style, but rather the result of the artist’s reflection, aware of the epoch in which we live which is undergone by the loss of beauty and daily life models.
The deformation of the figures does not conflict with the serene observation of the artwork. If anything it is the objective result of a subjective memory effort in a present objectively without memory.
Art becomes the healthy imposition of such an effort, the delicate dictator of the individual fantasy on the collective indifference of the so-called modern society.
To be modern means also being conflictual. Crespo develops a healthy conflictuality towards the external world through the construction of a jargon inhabited by figures that remind us of all, also one’s own feeling of extraneousness in a present theoretically inhospitable.
Therefore Crespo creates hospitality for her figures, she protects them through the size and dimensions and the box frame. So confined the field of the image becomes a kind of black hole in which the onlooker sinks into –despite his inattention– to find himself happily landed in front of a history miniaturization, history that has become fable or drama, visually pocketable. Then it is possible to see arising a healthy tension that comes from the iconography of the work and propagates out in concentric circles towards the external world like an earthquake epicenter which occasionally devastates every spectacular code.
The art fulfills that Nietzschean suggestion regarding the need to destroy, in order to build again in a better way, first the de-construction then the reconstruction of new iconographical universes.
The iconographical universe of Crespo springs from a profound language and subjects cross-breed, rich in form and material and arriving at a desired bottleneck of the space, which reminds the horror vacui of Baroque.
The richness of such an iconographical universe welcomes inside itself the incoherence of poetic expression formally opposed to each other: the Mediterranean vitality of the Baroque and the Lenten spirituality of northern European literature; the Sienese fifteenth-century of Neroccio and Sassetta and the seventeenth century of Domenico Fretti or of the Polish Bartolomeo Strobel; the Fragonard and Solimena eighteenth century and the Lyonese spiritualist of the nineteenth century; the Friedrich Romanticism and the twentieth-century Surrealism of the Roman School.
In any case, such a cataloguing of citations is bolted into the culture –specifically post-modern–of the last decades of our century, condensed into the Trans-avant-garde cultural nomadism and stylistic eclecticism.
Crespo’s iconographical hybridism finds its definite arrival in the works titling, the intertwining of the grotesque inner and the external sublime of titles: Umbrian Fainting, Veronica Freemason, Madrigal to Proserpina, Animula Böckliniana, The obscure womb of the Tumulus.
The grotesque in the artwork asks for the lofty title, which is also a sublimation of its difficulty to communicate its on fertile anachronism. In that way the titling becomes a further cultural operation of the artist that puts on show her own images through the modern offer of a reassuring label valorized by lexical offers like Madrigal to a sweet Nightingale or The high ground of the newborn world.
There we can observe Maria Cristina Crespo fin de siècle conscience making its way to give hospitality to the figures of her imagination and protect their grotesque. To do so she constructs around the art work a literary perimeter that vaporizes every difficulty and makes the work accessible, so she defeating the society inattention.

Achille Bonito Oliva

«I always look at the paintings – good or bad – in furniture stores, provincial hotels...». Like a true drinker, Picasso fed himself on anything, Brunello or Tavernello. I often come up with a good picture by simply contemplating models of doubtful nature…