Cristina Toledo (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, 1986) has been researching the role of women in different eras and media, such as cinema, for some time. For example, in her work for the publishing house Los Doscientos entitled "Cinema Paradiso", a tribute to Giuseppe Tornatore's 1988 film of the same name. This film is an ode to cinema, and in its final scene, we see the protagonist in a theater watching a montage made from numerous romantic scenes from different films that had been censored when he was a child. Cristina transforms two hundred frames from classic films that appear in this final scene into painting. This artist's book thus becomes the seed of this new project.
This time, Cristina collects and reinterprets the roles of legendary actresses from Hollywood's Golden Age, such as Marilyn Monroe, Veronica Lake, Judy Garland, and Kim Novak, who remain very much alive in the collective imagination but who demand a new perspective and critical vision.
Curator and art critic Natalia Alonso Arduengo provides us with some insights into a project that explores the representation of women in 20th-century cinema:
“In the end, femme fatales are only fatal to themselves,” says Silvia Plath, addressing the audience in Jorge Volpi's play ‘Las agujas dementes’. In this exhibition by Cristina Toledo, the mirror that shows a beautiful, enigmatic, and seductive woman becomes the movie screen, reflecting the stereotype of the femme fatale. Norma Jeane (Marilyn Monroe) is guilty of the Trojan War, like Helen. Anne Carson is clear about this. The female icons of Hollywood cinema, always portrayed from a male perspective, require new ways of being thought beyond the eternal feminine.”