María Cristina Carbonell’s paintings and sketches, her three-dimensional pieces and videos play quite freely with self-portrait. By using her own image as a starting point, together with images provided by her closest social circles and friends, the artist offers us a record of some of the decisive issues of our times thanks to a successful exploration of various techniques that reflect a deep understanding of her profession and a mastery of her media - which ranges from drawing, painting and sculpture to photography, video and installation. Her oeuvre reveals the workings of the conventions and the prejudices behind many contemporary myths - the gaps, fissures and seams of our self-presentation.

In effect, ideas related to lightness, suspension, weightlessness and their opposites, are a happy constant in Carbonell’s oeuvre. In her marble pillows, for example, the stone acquires the weightlessness and lightness of the fabric of dreams. Or quite the opposite, such as the line in her sketches of feathers (stirred by a taxonomical urge similar to that of nineteenth century naturalists, impeccably crafted and meticulously descriptive) that sets the thickness or thinness of the relief and volume of the sketches and achieves an astonishing monumentality.

All of these factors come together in her videos and are projected into her paintings: they reveal just how much the artist takes advantage of the crucial reach of children’s games of opposites and repetitions. With childlike joy she dresses herself up as a girl ­the girl she was or perhaps as her daughter - and provokes and incites the viewer in smoothly made pieces, containing essentially flat colors, little modulation, a certain disregard for volume, in which realism seamlessly flows into an expressionism recognizable from the distortion and disproportion of the figures. With delightful simplicity, this interplay of women and children mockingly teases every drop out of the Viennese Expressionist tradition of eroticism, with its themes alluding to prostitution and sexual innuendo, and flaunts the grotesque quality running through these works.

Carbonell, is in a way, erasing the line between reality and fiction. Her imaginary is a compilation of universal fragmentes: from the east to the West, from the North to the South.