Cristina Moroño: Second Chance

Puerta Roja kicks off the fall art season with the first solo exhibition in Asia by Hong Kong based Spanish artist Cristina Moroño. “Second Chance” presents a new series of works where objects and discarded books are plunged into Cristina’s own handmade paper, which plays both as content and canvas.

Cristina Moroño is an artist in pursuit of constant experimentation whose trajectory has been recognised and awarded by notable institutions such as the Joan Miró Foundation. Merging different practices, including photography, etching, engraving, collage and paper making, Cristina oscillates between the figurative and the abstract.

The Spanish artist has worked in Madrid, New York and now in Hong Kong, where she has produced her most recent series of works titled Second Chance which deepens the artist’s interest in experimentation by making her own paper. Blithely following in the footsteps of Antoni Tàpies’ “art informale” and its revolutionary use of mixed media and everyday objects, Cristina incorporates non-artistic materials into the work.

The creation of handmade paper is crucial, with the material serving as both canvas and content. In this series, she plunges elements of old books, paint and objects into the raw pulp. The result is a single sheet where the essence lies not in the perfect agglutination, but in the imprint, the wearing and natural perishing of the amalgamated elements. The objects’ fading hues and texts are juxtaposed with the brand new paper and sharp colours of the paint, reflecting a vanishing past and a fleeting present. Each is a personal memento documenting a particular time in her life.

The artist reflects on her new works: “Throughout my career, I have made works on paper, paintings, etchings, photography and ceramics that often depict the passage of time. Objects and people continually fade around us, too often without notice. In a time when the digital supplants the print format, I give these randomly found discarded books a second life… a Second Chance”.

The almost vanishing figurative elements give way to a form of abstraction that is intimate, perhaps echoing the ephemeral nature of our lives. By merging old found objects and new materials, Moroño grants the objects a new opportunity to express their form and substance and bestows them with new meanings.

Adriana Alvarez-Nichol, founder of Puerta Roja states: “We have been following Cristina’s work for a few years and we are thrilled for the gallery to now represent her in Asia. Since she relocated from New York to Hong Kong last year, we’ve been enthralled by her desire to experiment with something completely new, to reinvent herself and her work in this new stage of her career as an artist. Witnessing her working in her new studio in Ap Lei Chau, we see an artist for whom an intimate involvement in the process itself generates works of amazing maturity. The glimpses of old texts from abandoned books give these abstract paper landscapes a connection to the past whilst bringing new life to objects otherwise forgotten.”