Borrowing the formal qualities of icon painting, Natalia Gonzalez Martin’s work explores the inscriptions of a cultural heritage on one’s physical body and moral codes.
Placed in a bucolic setting, the figures represented are often adorned with detailed elements as delicate as fabrics, ripe tempting fruits and crawling insects. They are filled with historic symbolism, allowing us to pay attention to the traditions, gestures and habits we have inherited.
Natalia’s work merges the characters from old fables with the constant supply of images we are subjected to daily aiming to blur the boundaries between divine, secular and earth in order to gesture towards other ways of desiring, feeling or being in the world, attuned to these paradoxes.
Fragmentation suggests anteriority, decay and loss in relation to some superseded whole. As an antidote to this, the German tradition of Weltlandschaft painting (World’s Landscape), offers an imaginary panoramic landscape seen from an elevated viewpoint where everything is depicted with hallucinatory detail, allowing the artist to compress the totality of the world in a painting. Natalia creates a synthesis of both these ideas; a totality in the fragment, permitting the viewer to project their own experiences onto these universal gestures. ...
