From the Siren to the Tree-woman
Maria Cruz Urquijo’s work is rooted in a biographic construction intertwined with Nature.
Her deep bond with the sea and the earth is developed throughout her art process.
Buffa Urquijo’s creative path began when, as an adolescent, she settled down in the paradisiacal Brazilian city of Paraty, inside of Rio de Janeiro.
It was there that she took up photography and started to portray the organic landscape of the forest.
When such landscape becomes tactile, it gives rise to Maria Cruz’s other constituent language: sculpture.
Under the guidance of outstanding masters such as Freitas and Gamarra, she began to develop a sensuous, physical language of sculpture through polychromatic woodcarving. Her inclusion of color fostered her approach to painting, for which she trained with master Astica.
Her pictorial series rises in the setting of sculpture, materializing itself in high-reliefs of bodies, in a dance that remains motionless between the stretcher and the wood. The forest matter gives birth to a feminine essence of erotic curves and exotic scents.
Her carvings of mulberry wood, ash tree, and blue cedar are tactile territories, soft and delicate surfaces.
The force of the power saw turns into erogenous bodies. Trees rescued from the city become new dancing living creatures.
Her early paintings start from the territory that we call the body, her high-reliefs blending silhouettes that were conceived from the game-oriented perception of the figure-background dynamics.
Later on, Maria Cruz’s painting evolved into Landscape-Nature, live bark on vivid colors palettes drawing on Brazilian culture.
Her pictorial formats are true geographies created through vertical perspectives that evoke Japanese paintings, seascapes recreating a mythology stemming from the sea.
Sirens carved in wood dive into deep abstract landscapes.
Variegated forests give way to flat backgrounds with intense monochromes.
From the Sirens to the seas, from the big cities to the ocean, from the sculpture depicting bodies to the landscape of painting.
A journey through Maria Cruz’s work takes us from the city to the Matta Atlantica to Ibi Apy, whose meaning is “A Place Free of Evil”, the guarani name for Eden.
Another ancient archetype becomes apparent in the purification passage of her latest paintings: the Tree-woman, the cosmogonic symbol of rebirth.
Thus we reach the end of this intense individual exhibition that blends the forest with the city, sculpture with painting, the whole of the work giving rise to the Tree of Life that in its bosom carries the green kernel fruit of a new image of Woman.

Fabiana Barreda,2009