Rafel Jaume (poet, art critic and cultural promoter)
El Día de Baleares (The Day of Baleares, 1982)
The ingenuists and fatalisms. A strange being of a word.
I have read, I don’t know where, that man is that rare being of a word … I say this because the women she paints, with an innate grace and not without subtle irony, Cristina Fonollosa, I have seen in other paintings and on other occasions, but never like this and with this semi-intensity with which this Catalan painter portrays them to us. And I will say more. If a visit to his exhibition is repeated, surely the same paintings will seem to us with new recesses and the faces of the characters will attract us from different angles.
Cristina Fonollosa attacks naïf head on. See her detail in the brushstroke, her colors that look like a midday sun, the often insignificant themes with which she raises her works. The best of the exhibition – not inconsiderable in everything, rather the contrary – is, in my opinion, in these portraits of women in the foreground, as well as in the paintings of the skyscrapers. Only these last pictures would justify the exhibition and the visit to it.
Antonina Rodrigo (writer, historian and researcher)
Catalog of the Jaen International Museum of Naïf Art (1998)
The artist’s paintings are an open door to the enormous power of suggestion, magic and diaphanous grace of the best Naïf, to whom she confers magical realism, imbued with the content of her fertile imagination. Is her way a delicious painting, without trifles, with the configuration and warmth of his good profession … In the joy and delicacy of her objective and fantastic visions, tenderness and the fine humor that sometimes brings out the smile prevails.
Cristina, like the characters that animate her interiors and landscapes, goes through life in a humility outfit of sumptuous spiritual quality, with a wink of complicity is transmuted into her protagonists, in such a ductile way that one and the others naturally cross the fragile frontier of art and playful play …
… although they do not dispense with their ornate headdresses … necklaces, combs, blankets … virgins not only have their child at their chest, as a priority occupation, they can simultaneously hold a phone or wait near it for the longing for the loved man, or the lawyer who transmits the file of his marriage separation, or at high dawn … the stalking of the engine of the son’s car. They are seasoned women waiting!
In this series we find the Virgin of the Cats, the Virgin of the Books, that of the Demons, that of the Ku-Klux-Klan, that of Adam and Eve, that of the Mediterranean, that of the Fishbowl … but none with a trace of pain. Cristina dramatizes the Virgin-Woman of today, frees her as much as possible, as a just manifestation of the fight against the submission of our ancestors and makes them complicit in our problems …
Ramón Casalé (journalist and art critic)
Shapes and Angles (COPE Radio, 1998)
I have been following her work for a long time and she has never disappointed me, because in each of his exhibitions she offers us something new. Perhaps the most recent pieces are those with a religious theme, such as popular virgins, made from a very detailed perspective.
The series on New York, specifically that of the skyscrapers of the Hudson Bay, seen from Manhattan, which I already saw a few years ago in the Vilasar de Mar Museum of the Navy, and which I certainly loved, are of a plasticity exquisite aesthetics, where the line and order of the buildings combine with the chromatic rhythm of its light and dark glass facades, with the serenity of a greenish blue sea and the luminosity of a yellowish sky.
Mercedes de Prat (art critic)
International Association of Art Critics Magazine (1999)
Cristina has been addicted to color since childhood … If the architectural plans were a real job in a construction firm, this approach elevated Cristina Fonollosa to the category when she started painting more than fifteen years ago. Her images of New York, a city of beautiful skyscrapers, give us an impression of humorous plans, something that no architecture office would appreciate. The painting that she offers us today is diverse, since she combines her previous stage with a new fleshy and voluptuous in the shapes of her fruit bowls, her rare flowers, sweet leaves and lustrous cats that are asking to pass them to bronze or iron; perhaps Cristina Fonollosa now begins another path with the same love and humor as always.
Josep M. Cadena (art critic)
El Periódico de Catalunya (Catalonia’s Newspaper, 2003)
Resident in Cuba, Cristina Fonollosa has brought us from there a cheerful and colorful painting, funny in the fauve sense of her subjects. She maintains the characteristics of his previous works and cats, for example, continue to be the protagonists of many of the paintings. But there is also a more complete vision of the simple and important joys of life through still lifes and trees in which flowers and fruits combine. Fonollosa induces to practice the natural joys of life, without the material excluding the satisfactions of the spirit. She does not take refuge in the supposed naivety of children, but has the conception of the adult who does not give in to adversity and appreciates how much moments of happiness are worth. There is no artifice, but spontaneity.
Jorge Luís Sánchez Grass (teacher, art critic, TV show director)
Revista Cultural Ahora (Cultural Magazine Ahora, 2005)
Likewise are her virgins, in her image and likeness, full of grace and courage, like exquisite flowers from a nearby field, which could be the Eden of rivers or the deep root emerging from the bowels of the earth of some demon or bossy pixie. But of course, the imaginary virgins of Cristina Fonollosa do not believe in ornaments … they are like an invisible spout full of light and glory … All equally have won on the threshold of the sacraments our prayers of love and respect translated by the depth of the brush and the passion of the supposedly naive strokes. Here the primitive is also a feeling of love and faith, proof of fidelity and devotion, desires to have the knee on the ground next to the rosary …
Mildred Legrá Colon (journalist)
Periódico Ahora (Newspaper Ahora, 2007)
Naïf art is her passion, a condition that has led her to be one of the notable painters in this popular painting, which is not learned, but is born from the soul. Her participation in international competitions attests to his height.
Cristina, has art inside. Countless national and international exhibitions and awards distinguish her: virgins, landscapes, figures that sleep inside her memory. And the Cat, her most precious symbol and with an enormous power of magical existence, have awakened the attentive gaze of the public.
In her artistic environment and outside of it, her enriching action is evident, but more than that: no one can ignore this legitimate painter, upright, able to transport us with her brushes to elegance, tenderness, colors and to an plastic narrative that is sometimes impossible to overcome with words.