Installation view of Spotlight: Cristina BanBan at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2022
Photography by Steven Probert
Spotlight: Cristina BanBan
OCTOBER 1-22, 2022
The FLAG Art Foundation’s Spotlight exhibition series includes new or never-before-exhibited artworks accompanied by commissioned pieces of writing. It is the hope of this series to create focused and thoughtful dialogues between the visual arts and critics, scholars, poets, etc. In its fifth iteration, the Spotlight features Cristina BanBan’s The Three Graces, 2022, with a text by Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, PhD, Director of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY.
On Cristina BanBan’s The Three Graces, 2022
By Monica Ramirez-Montagut, PhD
My first free association seeing an image of Cristina BanBan’s work (while casually scrolling on social media) was of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Several months later, when FLAG approached me to write about her painting The Three Graces (2022), one of my first questions for Cristina—knowing she was born in Spain—was if I had brought my own assumptions to her work, or if indeed, she was influenced by Picasso? “Of course, I am!,” she said. “I grew up going to the Picasso Museum in Barcelona all the time. Les Demoiselles is one of my favorite paintings, I love the eyes…”
Early in our conversation, and without me asking, Cristina mentioned that she does not come from a family of artists. In Spain, family occupations are historically inherited and continue to be relevant today. Aristocracy, inheritance, and heritage are integral to Spanish culture and following in the steps of the family trade still carries weight. It was no surprise to me that Cristina considers herself an outsider to her family’s trade. Her grandmother was a modista [dressmaker], but wait, “someone on my grandfather’s side was a painter…,” she remembered. For Cristina, competency with painting was developed not through her family milieu but, first and foremost, through visual curiosity.
“One learns beforehand by looking [Se aprende antes con la mirada],” Cristina affirms, as she remembers the big, glossy Picasso coffee table book she grew up browsing; it was published by a local bank as a Christmas giveaway for clients. She particularly liked staring at eyes and hands, on their own, separate from the body. She also mentioned being arrested by Francis Bacon’s depictions of faces, which she considers somewhat aggressive, but appreciates their need for a double take, for a delay in apprehending their abstraction, their expression, and Bacon’s gesture. By searching other artists’ gestures, Cristina finds tools for arriving at her own expressionistic approach to painting, one that allows, like Bacon, an escape from her sitters or models, which on occasion are herself.
While Cristina wants to unpack the psychology of seeing and staring (thus her fascination with eyes), she cannot escape the physical need to paint and draw, and the daily practice of incising carbon on a piece of paper or pushing a brush against the surface of a canvas. “I practice every day, every single day,” she says. “It started when I was about five years old when I went to art classes after school and during the summer.” Folks, art summer camps are important!
In 2012, Cristina moved from Barcelona to London to learn English. There, she kept drawing, painting, engraving, illustrating... working. By 2016, she was painting at home studio and doing DIY exhibitions in movie theaters and cafes. Cristina also realized she could reach out to a digital audience via social media (which now reaches more than 30K followers). In 2017, she won the Royal Academy’s Arts Club Prize, awarded to artists aged 35 or younger. Her work made an important shift in 2021, when she transitioned from painting with acrylic to oil. Another shift is taking place now, as she moves away from fully-rendered scenes and prioritizing narrative—albeit open ended—to explore abstraction. Cristina finds a struggle in abstraction, namely a fight with herself, which she considers both new and exciting. Her somewhat “unfinished” paintings also provide surprises, tension, and ultimately the escape/release she’s looking for. “What got me here is painting, it is all those years of practice based on making and making,” she says. “I paint non-stop because I have to. It’s like a diary but based on painting, and now I paint women because that is what I know.”
Cristina’s senyoretes [demoiselles in her native Catalonian] “are like me!” she says. “I am very emotional, and these paintings help me leave everything on the canvas.” Hers are complex, larger than life, empowered women. Their scale avoids mentally inserting them into a storyline in a specific, comprehensive narrative (like characters in paintings that function as window into a scene). Her women are also too big to fit within the confines of the canvas, at least from the knees down. They do not appear to be self-portraits either, given that, standing in front of them, our spectator gaze falls onto their bellies and chests; we are somehow too close and perhaps invading their personal space. To see their expressions, we need to look upward or take a step back.
For me, Cristina’s figures function more like giant matriarchs with giant hands—hands that work, paint, and get shit done. Her figures multitask and move around on their own axes or, bringing to mind Picasso again, we (as viewers) are the ones rotating around them, and they, in turn, appear fragmented by our changing viewpoints. They seem part of a syncretic cluster, yet still somewhat lost in their thoughts, forgetting why they were on their way and to where? They are unassumingly beautiful, they have presence, integrity, and are onto something. They don’t have time to be sexualized; their nakedness is presented as an intrinsic part of their exposed psyche, not meant to capture the desires of the viewer. The senyoretes’ gazes—up high and through flat Picasso-like eyes—pass over the viewer (not engaging in the manner Maurice Berger would have expected), go behind the viewer, or may not even reach the viewer. Perhaps these paintings are largescale, visceral introspections. Cristina’s senyoretes are not meant to look back at us and return our gaze, they are meant to make us feel in their own terms. Her approach to painting the female figure has been labeled feminist. In our conversation, we wondered if, by just being unapologetically who she is and bringing that conviction to the canvas is the reason for this label? We wondered if this particular categorization, looking at integrity and conviction through a gendered lens, exists when describing the work of male artists?
More to the point, Cristina describes these paintings as “a fight with myself.” In my opinion, this struggle is the underlying force that drives the authenticity, dynamism, and push and pull of this phase of her career. As viewers, we witness Cristina’s fight to avoid fully rendered imagery; her fight to allow impulsive and visceral brushstrokes dictate shapes or affect how she expresses feeling; her fight to keep or stop painting, or to let the initial drawing layer of the painting reveal itself, or not; her fight to render depth and atmospheric backgrounds or push toward the surface with impasto; her fight to get closer to the canvas (to appreciate the brushstroke) or move away from it (to appreciate the overall composition); her fight to present a character or simply imply its presence; her fight to acknowledge the struggle of finding composition; and her fight to present herself, the artist, as both grounded and present.
As participants, we may be left exhausted watching the pendulum of art history swing between the giants of figuration and abstraction in Cristina’s work, but perhaps, her paintings leave us cautious as we address our own confusion in how we read images. In my case, I was invigorated by the experience of discovering the range of her painting. I was excited to witness the becoming of a figure through her passion with painting. I left Cristina’s studio thinking how much I would enjoy watching her in conversation with other painters as this is the conversation she is ultimately having: she is a painter’s painter.
About:
Cristina BanBan (b. 1987, Barcelona, Spain) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. BanBan earned a BFA in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona in 2010. Her upcoming solo exhibition Mujeres, will open at Skarstedt, New York, in November 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Perrotin, Paris, France (2022); Melancolía, Perrotin, Shanghai, China (2021); Del Llanto, 1969 Gallery and Albertz Benda, New York, NY (2021); Changelings, Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong, China (2020); Tigre y Paloma, 1969 Gallery, New York, NY (2020); I’ve Got Nothing to Lose, 68 Projects, Berlin, Germany (2019); and My Dear Demons, Dot Project, London, United Kingdom (2018). BanBan has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Present Generations, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (2021); The Hort Family Collections, New York, NY (2019); and Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2017, Royal Academy of the Arts, London, United Kingdom. She was the recipient of a residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia (2019) and The Arts Club Prize, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017). BanBan’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL.
Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, PhD, is the Director of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY. Previously, Ramírez-Montagut held positions at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI (Director, 2020-22); Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, New Orleans, LA (Director, 2014-20); MACLA (Movimiento Arte Y Cultura Latino Americana), San Jose, CA (Associate Director & Senior Curator, 2013-14); San Jose Art Museum, San Jose, CA (Senior Curator, 2012-13); The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT (Curator, 2008-12); The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, 2005-08); and Price Tower Art Center, Bartlesville, OK (Curator of Collections and Public Programs, 2004-05). She attended the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, Mexico, from 1990-95, and received master’s and doctoral degrees in Art and Architectural Theory from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, in 1996 and 2003, respectively. A trained architect, Ramírez-Montagut co-curated the 2006 Zaha Hadid retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, after which she made the professional shift to work with contemporary artists. In 2020, she joined the Board of Trustees of the U.S. International Council for Museums (ICOM), is a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AMMD), and was one of the panelists of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs that selected artist Simone Leigh to represent the US in the 2022 Venice Biennale. Her writing has been included in monographs on artists KAWS (Rizzoli Electa, 2010) and Eddie Martinez (Picture Box, Inc., 2013).