Maria the painter never stopped drawing. In her work, drawing and painting have always kept up an open, creative conversation. The artist’s strategy has been to advance and retreat in terms of the internal needs of her own drawing but, also, as a result of her own existential queries. The advance nearly always takes place at the level of language as the apparent buffering of the subjects, whereas subjects impose retreat as the apparent foreswearing of linguistic emotion. In fact, every retreat is part of an advance, the subject renewing language and vice versa. In each one of her subjects, as tackled in successive series (that underscore the conceptual dimension of her ideas about drawing) the artist evolves from flesh to bone, from emotion to concept, from an expressionist focus to construction.

Throughout more than twenty years of drawing, three subjects have continued to interest the artist: body, landscape and house. The latter imposes itself as an instrument for learning about the body and the world.

Continually compounding her method, she then associates this deconstruction/reconstruction of the house to an identical process as regards the grammar of the drawing, analyzing each one of its constituent elements.

Deconstructions of houses and, earlier on, of the body, are steps in the construction of the drawing. In the following stage, she builds her drawings directly with the paper, fusing support and material in a single object. Using color, she three-dimensionalizes straight lines, curves, arabesques, and geometric figures, distributing them directly upon the wall, where they appear to levitate lyrically. Constellation of forms. Pure visuality.

The new drawings are, actually, graphic objects built on and with paper. They are coherent developments of her earlier propositions, down to the terms of their thematic triad: body, landscape and house. They may be regarded as architecture, as poetic shelters or even as cocoons or nests – that erupt or elevate themselves above the horizontality of the paper. Others require the observer’s playful participation in order that the artist’s proposition may be fully revealed. In others, still, after juxtaposing and gluing the sheets of paper, the artist gouges the new support. Lines and planes are three-dimensionalized, contemplation gives way to participation, surprise displaces habit, and synthesis replaces narrative. Time is spatialized. Maria and her graphic objects offer a new reading of Neo-Concretism, even as she radicalizes the concept of drawing.