Art of Christina Oiticica
Empathy with the spiritual and nature.
What matters are the senses, the gaze we lay upon a place. — Christina Oiticica
Christina Oiticica paints the natural world around her, but she also interacts, the natural world is part of the process, she buries her paintings in the ground, in the beds of streams.
We can view Nature through a window, or we can be outside, and experience Nature, the rain and the wind in our face.
Lacking a studio in the Pyrenees, Christina painted outside.
When I went to live in the Pyrenees, at first there was no room for a studio, because I lived in a hotel. At that time I had an exhibit in Paris and needed to paint big canvases, so I began to take them into the open fields. One day I noticed that a leaf had fallen on one of the paintings and tinted the paint. I liked that.
At that time I had bought a canvas measuring ten meters, and that is when the idea of the “Four Seasons” arose, a canvas that I took out into the woods and developed and elaborated and painted according to the seasons, always covering it with earth, branches of trees and stones. At the same time I wanted to expand this project by leaving some paintings in dry river-beds later to be covered by water, others around tree trunks, and so on.
To enter the Amazon, you need permission of the forest.
It’s earth that nurtures us. It’s earth that gives us life. And this is absolutely feminine.
Between 2006 and 2008, Christina chose the Way of St James, El Camino de Santiago, a sacred and symbolic place that receives pilgrims from all over the world, as her studio. She composed her canvases at different locations along the Way, using the relief of rocks, the intervention of rain, snow, the color of the soil, natural pigments and wax. Once composed, they were “planted” in the ground and recovered sometimes days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months later.
I returned to the Way that I traveled on foot 16 years ago. The way of the stars that took me through forests, plains, rivers and churches all the way to Santiago de Compostela.
I decided to go back there with my paintings because I wanted my work to return to the source of its spirituality, the stones trodden by centuries of pilgrims, the faith-flooded plains.
El Camino de Santiago, is a medieval pilgrims route. It was a very heavily traversed route, but slowly fell into disuse, such that by the mid-1980s, few walked the route. It has seen exponential growth since the publication of The Pilgrimage.
When we reached Santo Domingo de la Calzada, we were surprised that the church was still open at eight o’clock in the evening. When we entered, a missionary who had lived in Africa was delivering a beautiful sermon in which he reminded the congregation that the mission of the Church was always missionary, in other words, always going towards the other, always building bridges between cultures. This gave me great inspiration because I saw correspondences with my own work: a pilgrim work that leaves the four walls of the studio to meet Nature, a work that goes towards the unknown and is never the same.
Some artists record Nature, some work outside, the natural world their studio, for Christina, Nature is a part of her art, as the brush, the paint and the canvas.
