They wear veils embroidered with mournful lace but are not widowed mothers, just orphaned teenagers. They copulate and dance with death, are split into necrophiliac nymphets, entering with their alter egos in a Pop Hades, as Persephones avid of extreme experiences.
Delicate faces of ominous look that Crajes paint (artist duo formed by Carla Rendon and Jessica Ruiz) remind us of the Filippo Lippi madonnas, their premonitory melancholy. But the expiatory pathos is closer to painful Baroque virgins. As in these, stigmata are manifested: tears of blood, wounds, death omens.
Crajes combines her fascination with the grotesque eroticism of Mauro Suehiro and other manga authors with religious iconography of the Renaissance and Baroque painting, oozing between both the darkest emanations of the soul from the hand of decadent and dark romantics, all it filtered by the aestheticized gore of Dario Argento. From the latter they pick up his reinterpretations of fairy tales as terror stories; from Poe adopted (in their own way) the feline symbolism, they turn the black cat into masturbatory toy or in threatening silhouette with a nod to Disney, pointing to the perverse disneyfication of the experience.
As Poe, they delve into our self-destructive instincts, although in our times fueled by the merchandising and social conditioning, which leads teens to constant reinvention, to fruitless searches of their identity. Hence in previous series abound porcelain prostheses, metallic orthopedics… Ballardian and lynchian nightmares sticking alike.
By adopting with irony and critical load eucharistic words as the title of this exhibition, Take and eat, this is my body which is given for you, point to the expiatory role of the female body, but at the same time redeem it printing on rebellion gestures. For there is in these women something ungraspable, in the courage to throw themselves into the jaws of morbid dementia.
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CRAJES solo show in Plastic Murs, Valencia:
Accipite et manducate ex hoc omnes: Hoc est enim corpus meum, quod pro vobis tradetur
until 21 th October
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