For post-Renaissance civilization, “Sacred Art” is the expression of a domestication of that “irrational feeling of terror as well as fascination through which the relationship of Man with God, the numinous, is expressed”, which Rudolf Otto singles out as the origin of every religious feeling. Such domestication has had two reverse consequences: on the one hand it has produced our ideas of justice, our moral law and the notion of sin, while on the other the images of deities have lost their mysterium tremendum, they have become images and depictions of mercy, providence, pardon and have brought about the elaboration of a parliament of Saints and little holy pictures. “God is the greatest work of Man”, says Camille Paglia, and her words get to the heart of the dimension of the Sacred in Art, tearing into two halves the “personified heaven” (this is the etymological meaning of the word “God” in Jewish) in order to impose a condition of ecumenical religiosity of the Art community, which expresses through its works the overcoming of the traditional barriers of national identity, language or religion so as to expand itself towards new creative territories, a religious culture (“religio” has the same etymological root of “collect”, “bind”, “keep together”) which is able to welcome every tradition and exists not in order to put limits or subtract, but to add and multiply.
One of the facets of this prism can be found in Maria Cristina Crespo’s work (which has become part of a prestigious end-of-20th-century art collection called “Translacje” from the title of an exhibition held last summer in Piotrkòw Trybunalski, in Poland, an international project in which about 100 artists from all over the world took part). Her production bursts with stories and myths coming from the most disparate sectors of culture and art. Ms Crespo believes that invention which generates a work of art can originate indistinctly either from a literary hint or from oral tradition, both “elevated” culture and “popular” culture being a source of inspiration, though the latter shows a greater potential for invention, since it is more subject to the moods, impressions and assonances of an ancient world which through those very ritual forms of religiosity, in sayings or proverbs, expresses itself.
Ms Crespo’s cultural nomadism comes under a transversal exploration which cancels unfailing categories and conventions, such as the ancient and the archaeological or myth, of which her aedicules are essentially a mask (the Greek word mimeishai, in its etymological relationship with mimesis, means “wearing a mask on the part of the actor”, as Jaques Derrida notices), the fatal in the present, the fetish in myth, the physical trace of the disappeared Sacred of which only small fragments can be found again in primitive religion and in popular superstition: the holy statuettes, the small statues of the Virgin, the little holy pictures and all that overproduction of idols which are included among the kitsch products of that sense of veneration that has replaced the terror of the Sacred in religion. Beyond a decorative “excess” beside myths and narrations, in Cristina Crespo’s work there is also a precious individual dimension, carefully hidden amongst the materials she normally uses in her work: laces, velvet, fabrics, brooches and small objects used in the creative ritual carried out with a needle and a thread. They are magical elements she draws from her own personal reservoir, the signs which interweave her work as an artist with a more ancient material tradition, disappeared in the sacred but resuscitated by Cristina Crespo in Art.

Angelo Capasso