Female Inferno
Elizabeth Daza
What do women want? What does society want for women? As an advertising executive in Nuremberg and Munich, Leticia Cortez had to try to answer these questions in her campaign ads everyday. Realizing that she would probably never find a reconcilable answer between the two, she decided to leave behind the illusory world of advertising to explore these questions through art.
The 31 year old painter’s work has become a dedicated dialogue between the inner soul and the projected self. The female nudes that dominate Cortez’s latest works often appear trapped in an inferno of unrequited lust, their faceless bodies distorted at uncomfortable angles as they grapple with their own hunger. Their nakedness is more aggressive than vulnerable, and always enveloped in nothing but color.
The female form plays a significant role as storyteller within the paintings, and each tells her story through the expressiveness of body language. Cortez even goes so far as to feminize the seven deadly sins, creating a series of paintings depicting each mortal failing using the shape of a woman. Each of the figures becomes humanized in the hunger of her own primitive instincts. According to Cortez, her paintings come from an "eternal occupation" with the questions: "May I show rage openly? May I be arrogant? My I feel lust? And finally, does this correspond to the rules of feminism?" The male figure rarely ever makes it into the conceptual story of Cortez’s paintings to help provide an answer.
This is not say that the male presence is not dealt with. The paintings all toy with the idea of perspective, as one can never be sure whether the paintings are an expression of the inner female psyche, or if the bodies trapped on the canvas are an exaggerated representation of a male viewpoint. Cortez purposely makes a definitive viewpoint unattainable because the very question of the outward self is delusive. Instead, we get what Cortez defines as "snapshots of a soul world, whose abysses are perhaps the heights, and the successes in the society are actually human descent." Tormented as Cortez’s subjects are by this discord, the emotional rawness of her paintings never claims to answer any questions, but instead constantly reiterates them.
Cortez’s works will be soon be exhibited in Kiel and Munich in collaboration with the artist Stojan Djuric.
