Art Review : An Exercise in Extremes

Maria Martinez-Canas’ photo-based images are technically impressive but conceptually thin. In eye-grabbing combinations that snap with crisp, visual energy, her unique, black-and-white prints at Iturralde Gallery fuse abstract, surrealistic figures with common travel photographs.

The problem with the 33-year-old, Cuban-born, U.S.-educated and Miami-based artist’s otherwise promising work is that it puts forth a formulaic, rather conservative version of social identity. Her large images look like flattened-out compositions based on the paintings of Wifredo Lam. Martinez-Canas has eliminated the middle ranges, keyed up contrasts and sharpened the spiky forms for which the Cuban Modernist is famous.

She has also filled in selected figures and fields with snapshots of Spanish cities, the canals of Venice and pre-Columbian ruins. Most important, she has invented a clever process of cutting and making collages of negatives, then printing the mysteriously seamless results on single sheets of paper.

Martinez-Canas’ use of Lam’s spindly, totemic figures gives her images some art historical authority and identifies her work as Cuban. But this insistent nationalism denies Lam’s own international aspirations and detracts from Martinez-Canas’ technical virtuosity, undermining her powerfully inventive use of photographic processes.

* Iturralde Gallery, 154 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-4267, through June 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.