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If nationality and cultural identity, like gender, can be regarded as inherent aspects of Maria Cruz's practice as an artist, these are not issues to fore front. Her's is a more subtle correspondence between such personal givens and an exploration of the means and motivations of producing art. For Cruz, painting is an engagement with the personal and the inventive, the privileged domain of self expression tempered by a more detached awareness of the roots of such investigation. The traditional art historical obsession with discerning intimations of personal biography in the art object, so influentially disclaimed by Roland Barthes, is given a more appropriate contemporary analogue in Cruz's personal reading of art history- an ongoing exploration of 'first contact' with art images that is difficult to disassociate from the aura of childhood memory and the desire to relive that inaugural fascination. What is art? What do pictures mean?
Attempts to rework famous paintings of religious and national significance, or the age old generic still life theme, are, for Cruz, an important ongoing concern, touching on a provocative blend of notions of painting's lost transcendence, and of truth to the reductive automatic nature of the act of representation. This is not so much a mere reappropriation, as it is a pseudo sacred act of reliving and experiencing the original, even if that 'original' was itself a copy or reproduction. It is a re-enactment of the academic tradition via the brushstrokes of the amateur, with all the investment of love and effort involved in such initiating struggles. In Cruz's show, When I liked romantic paintings (Mori Gallery, Sydney, September 1991; Artspace, Adelaide Festival Centre, April 1992), these humble 'unskilled' images accompanied others... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline