With regard to an exhibition of masks
By Ruben Vela
Tucumán-born painter and sculptress Marta Díez Ojeda has opened an exhibition of the masks she has created, which merit some comments because of their quality and the interest they stir. Masks are one of the oldest magic elements, reaching us from the early paleolithic period and constituting a representation by man of protective or evil spirits manifesting themselves through ancestral rites. In this exhibition Marta Díez Ojeda has taken up one of the oldest of symbols with a view to assigning it new languages through a modern version, without it losing the symbolic content that characterizes it. This artist is a creator who knows what she wants, and recreates, through art, a wide memory of myths in which the religious meaning takes a prominent place. Watching these masks amounts to being convinced that we are facing strange conjuring and rites in which man is transformed into sacred matter, since through his masking he will be visited by the spirits floating in the wide space between his own reality and holiness. By putting a new accent on them, Marta Díez invents her own myths, her thoroughly particular ceremonies arising from her own self. Marta Díez is at the same time the conjuring and the sacrifice showing us that through art and beauty we may reach the magic world that modern man has been deprived of. RUBEN VELA is a poet, art critic and diplomat. He has spent a long time at various places in Africa, and he is the owner of an excellent collection of African masks. © LA GACETA