ART REVIEW

Fine Forms: Born in Cuba, raised in Puerto Rico and now living in Miami, Maria Martinez-Can~as would seem ripe for exploring the identity politics so ubiquitous in art of the ‘90s. Her work, now at the Iturralde Gallery, does in fact explore issues of origins and collective cultural memory; but where it shines brightest is on the level of pure form.

While technically they are considered photographs, Martinez-Can~as’ images derive from printmaking, painting, montage and photographic processes. In the current show, each negative the artist has printed from is a hybrid of other photographs (mostly of stone ruins), fragments of text about Stonehenge, scattered onion skins and a masking element (Amberlith), in solid and liquid forms, cut or painted in the shape of tendrils and leaves. The resulting prints read like a diary of formal possibilities with a broad, rich textural range.

Different scales of time and space dance across the paper, from the tangible immediacy of the translucent traces of onion skin to the coded remoteness of the photographs of ancient monuments. Martinez-Can~as plays deftly with contrast--between black and white, fragility and permanence, memory and evidence--and skillfully with layering. Her subject stays fairly amorphous in this body of work, but her technique has never been more refined.

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* Iturralde Gallery, 154 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-4267, through Nov. 26.