Ana Fuentes review

In the history of art and literature, the prepubescent girl as subject has always made us uncomfortable.  Artists such as Carroll, Nabokov, and Balthus fixed their gaze upon that liminal space between innocence and knowledge, creating in their works an exquisitely tenuous balance of purity and perversity.  Their art is entrancing, yet it makes us feel as if on the verge of something illicit.  
The preternatural girls in Ana Fuentes's paintings are unsettling too, but in quite the opposite way.  Here the male gaze is absent, and so is any trace of sensuality.  Rather, it is the young girls who stare directly at us.  They may be more fully clothed than Balthus's languorous beauties, but even in their prim Victorian fashions they strike us as infinitely more vulnerable.  It is their interior worlds, not their bodies, which are raw and exposed.  
Fuentes understands innocence not as the absence of knowledge but as the refusal to abandon hope in the very face of darkness.  The girls in her paintings are not pure in our modern sense of the obliviousness of childhood.  They are damaged or frightened or alone.  Fuentes depicts them wide-eyed against forbidding backgrounds--- a frozen lake, a maze of brambles, a bare stage --- and highlights their isolation with small details such as a lace collar or a red bow that create heartbreaking contrast with the stark settings.  The blackbirds that appear repeatedly in these works are not an ominous presence so much as a sad metaphor for loneliness, like secular versions of Flaubert's parrot.  Yet even in their strangeness and silence, Fuentes's young girls remain innocent in that their beauty represents hope.  For Fuentes, youthful innocence, no matter how touched by pain, is our only bulwark against despair.

Paola Sada

Historiadora de Arte