Marta Diez mask

By Nelida Norris

Unusually artistic as they are, these works display an imaginative sensitivity that interprets the plastic originality of ancient masks and at the same time enhances these visual creations from early peoples through the magic prism of poetry. Painter and sculptress Marta Díez, and poet, essayist and art critic Rubén Vela, have created this successful connection between ethnologic art and harmonious words.
It is a known fact that masks were religious objects with a value of their own for primeval human beings. In her prologue, Marta Díez acknowledges masks as being “among the earliest representations of man´s religious adventure” (6) a conclusión to which Rubén Vela adds the lyricism of the following poem:
“Among the numberless faces of God
populating the marvellous universe,
only one remains open-eyed.
This solitary mask with wounded eye-holes,
recreated by Marta Díez
in the deep memory of night,
attests that God exists
through those empty eyes.
(Justification, 7)
There is a noticeable clairvoyence in these poetic statements, as shown by the fact that around the end of 1970 the Vatican created the Pontifical Missionary-Ethnological Museum, for the purpose of collecting masks, statues and objects produced by the culture and tradition of the aboriginal peoples, as a means of widening comprehension and respect for their religiousity and acknolowledging their belief in God as expressed through their primitive imagery.
The collection of over twenty striking masks is displayed with artistic versatility and ethnological truthfulness in contact with the iconography from early peoples as distant and scattered as the various tribes in Africa, Australasia and America.
Besides, in an approach to primitive mysticism, Marta Díez always grasps the foremost signs in human faces. As a matter of fact, sometimes the traits in her masks display sensuousness in the curve of the lips, as in the golden piece headed “Wealth”, or else a certain impudence tinged with humour, as in the big-toothed, bright-faced person depicted in “Lord of Maize”.
In a more challenging example, mask-wearing reveals a witch´s face both mocking and mysterious, concealing the truculence of her unsuspected carnal magic in the following statement,
I am the terrible witch, I am the mask
of the goddess of circumcision, the one feared by teen-agers
whom I each year turn into men.
Thin teeth cut through the shameful knot
and he who is wounded by me will in fact be favoured,
as I am a maker of men.
I am the witch spreading love over their sacrifice.
(The divine lady, 20-21)
This mask is strikingly similar to the one entitled Murana Pwo, from Equatorial Africa. Though the face is shy, even more so than in “The divine lady”, the traits are noticeably similar in the curve of the half-open mouth, the low eyelids, the headdress with loose hair, and the unmistakable sign on the forehead of either woman, perhaps as a sign of high-ranking caste.
Nor does this ideographic configuration omit the often-frightening, at times hallucinated figure of the chaman – an arrogant eminence among his tribe, who “plays with the unaware gods and becomes the owner of the Universe” (Sacred tree, 24). Or, protected by his totemic badge, he takes advantage of female weakness with the authority derived from his magic power, which has now been turned into fascinating dismay by Rubén Vela´s lyricism:
Changed into a night bird,
the sorcerer calls upon his beloved goddesses
in order to test the ointments of love, the one-day-long passion.
His silhouette draws women toward him,
passion turning them into roses without petals and shrieks mixed up
with the roaring of wild beasts.
(Night bird, 30)
The mask of the sun as a king is truly impressive. Surrounded by a half-circle of sharp sparks of the brightest gold, this “father of Life” expands his beaming youthfulness
“ over one half of the world”, while “saving the other half for dreams”. (The sun turns round, 12)
Marta Díez´s mastery at her art reaches an even higher level. This is shown with Carnival-like humour in a frieze depicting masked beauties from “past eras that have crossed the infinite”, now gathering around a beautiful woman with enigmatic eyes conveying “ a certain amount of happiness on the hard profession of living.” (Fading faces, 8-9). At the same time, they conjure up a new art reference in the creative flow displayed by Marta Díez in this piece.
José EmilioBurucúa´s Epilogue is an interesting contribution to “chimerical representation” when defining masks. The translation into English of the entire text furthermore enhances this artistic project.
In fact, this is sui generis art work in the plastic daring of its mesmerizing visualization, connected with lyrical fluency of an intuitive originality.