Conference « A Moral Story » with Cristina Toledo, Madrid, 03/14/19. Fotographer: Alejandro Cayetano

« My work reflects issues that interest me, and being a feminist, that concern for the role of women in society is observed in my work »

Tournemire Gallery – With this exhibition, you chose to take the Victorian era as your inspiration. Why are you interested in this specific period?.

Cristina Toledo – The paintings in “The sequestered emotion” are part of a series that I started from photographs from this period that caught my attention because they encoded mourning and the relationship with death based on the concealment of the face. I had already worked in previous series with the mask and the hidden face because it seems to me an interesting subject for painting, a technique that can be associated with the duality of hiding / revealing. What interested me at the time was that rigid and codified way of telling emotions. That established and conventional correlation between the image and meaning and the advantages that selecting images in which that reading is not so clear could give me, at least for us who read it without having all the codes from those days.

T.G. – You paint from photographs found in different types of files. Why is photography a more powerful source for you than the living model? And how do you choose among them the ones you consider most relevant?

C.T. – I have always been fascinated by photographs from other eras. See family albums, old press, illustrated books from the beginning of the century… And I like to use the representation of the human figure to think about the ways we have are related to images and the “visible”. We are surrounded by images all day, more and more, so I find it interesting to rescue some of them to transform them into paintings so they can be seen from a different perspective, to spend time contemplating them and thinking along with them.

To select which photographs to take to canvas, I take into account the environment that I want to create with the set: how the pieces will dialogue with each other, the evocative power of the image, and the formal elements that allows me digg into an interesting pictorial work.

T.G. – In your series of paintings, the characters do not seem to express any real emotion because they hide, cover or reflects her face through a mirror and, in some cases, they act as if they wanted to teach the “right way” to suffer. What do you think is behind all this?

C.T. – I think we are facing some examples of a time when everything was exactly measured and coded, and each emotion had to be manifested in a conventional way, without leaving room for spontaneity. In turn, some of the portraits are probably an artistic experiment by the photographer, which also introduces a playful element in the series. If we stop to think about the current types of photographs we see every day, we could also establish a few perfectly coded categories, although, apparently, it seems that we are very free and “natural” in our way we presen tour image.

T.G. – You are, in the end, taking about life in society, about human behaviors rather than about a specific time. Have you always been interested in establishing your conversation about the world around you and about society in general with your work?

C.T. – Exactly. I am interested in the fact that the one who sees my work, can establish parallels between different temporal moments, without having to show it in an evident way. I think that using photographs from other times makes that more open reading possible. It is not something I’ve been always aware of or intentionally pursued. The look at life in society has emerged naturally in my work, often based on an interest in the representation of women.

T.G. – Right, the woman is often, if not almost always, in the center of your work. Could you describe your work as committed and feminist or are they labels that you do not identify with?

C.T. – The committed artist label I feel it does not suits me, because I believe that there are other artists who approach social problems in a much more active and direct way than I do. However, my work reflects issues that interest me, and being a feminist, that concern for the role of women in society is present in my work. Both in this series and in others I have worked on before, I have been very interested in showing how numerous methods of control over women are established by codifying how their bodies should be and how they can or cannot be shown to others. My way of dealing with these issues may not be obvious, probably because painting as a language is also one of my main interests when working, but I do think it is right to describe my work as feminist.

T.G. – In your way of painting you do not approach a hyper-realistic style because it would not make sense in terms of reinterpretations of the photographs. How would you rate your pictorial style and in what sense does it move away from the simple photographic copy?

C.T. – It is difficult for me to label my painting, beyond being a realistic figuration but not photorealistic. I always try to play with the different possibilities that the medium provides, applying different pictorial resources as long as they allow me to maintain a certain unity in the image while not loosing the meanings that I found in the photography from which I started. I want to think that with my way of treating painting I add a load of plasticity and sensuality to the initial image.

T.G. – We would like to know your general opinion on the art world today and in particular on the role of painting in it?

C.T. – The Art World is so wide and varied that we could better say the Art Worlds, since I believe that even only within the Madrid scene many trends and affinities can be distinguished, as well as many levels of professionalization and market. For the part that concerns me, and thinking about the role that painting plays, I would say that it is a medium that at first arouses little interest in those who decide what is relevant for exhibitions and what is supposed to define what is going on these days. However, it is a medium that continues to have a privileged role in the market, and this is easy to prove if we tae a look into the programming of galleries and at fairs. Then there are the artists, who in the end do they we want, because with a market as weak as the Spanish one, the best thing you can do is be honest and consistent with your interests. I believe that painters will continue to work because painting is a language that never runs out and connects with tactile and aesthetic needs that are deeply human, just as I believe that it will always have an important place in the Art world because it will there always be people who enjoy it.

T.G. – What are you working on right now? Where is your focus as an artist in the short-medium term?

C.T. – Right now I continue working on the same line for an upcoming Solo Exhibition that I have scheduled for May. I think I can still continue exploring these images and that I have not yet exhausted the meanings and reading possibilities that I can extract from them. At the same time I am starting to collect images related to spiritism and magic tricks; diving into the first photographic effects that simulated ghost appearances and represented the supernatural. I’m still in a very early stage of it, so I really don’t know if it will see the light as a series of paintings or will stay in one of my many folders of images that does not go beyond the computer screen.