An Act of Poetic Imagination
Architecture • Geometry • Abstraction • Poetry
Motherwell said that abstract art is an art stripped down to the bare to show only the fundamental. It is curious how from that angle, abstract photography is the most purely objective and figurative, eliminating the superfluous to create an object sustained by the pure form. One cannot look at abstract art without thinking. It is probably the art expression that most requires intellectual exercise.
The structures that shelter us are initially functional, strictly a haven from elements and threats. But we believe that is not enough, we make spaces an extension of ourselves and then, as Laurence Durrell suggests, those spaces form us as social and urban entities. Where there is matter there is geometry, said Johannes Kepler. In Architecture, materials and geometry are added to light and time, to evolve in a language that speaks of stories, or simply presents a place to gaze and evoke or trigger ideas that suggest more than what we see . In that process, the work is “ruining itself”, in the sense of becoming gradually a ruin, as said Carlos Mijares, the great Architect and close friend of Martirene – … a ruin losses its accessories to keep the fundamental.-
Martirene Alcántara has a romance, in fact various simultaneously, but one of the strongest is with architecture, and to photograph it is her form of courtship. Her romance, combined with great passion, does not diminish in intensity with time, only changes its manifestations. In this Act of Poetic Imagination, she traverses spaces and takes, from each one, essential elements to create her astounding images. Gradually, she has been stripping the structures to stay only with the fundamental. Her constructions are connected to the imagination, they begin from the concrete, suggesting new forms and readings to propose a new journey in the imagination of the viewer. Martirene’s traveling vocation, certainly influences her artwork to create imaginary architecture from structural elements she picks up here and there, elements of stone, or elements of light; no matter where they come from, what matters is what they become.
Ricardo J. Garibay
Coyoacán, 2016
Coyoacán, 2016