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Christina Oiticica exhibits in two countries

Paris - Artist Christina Oiticica has been round the world collecting cards, just for fun: boarding passes, visiting cards, credit cards, hotel keys (plastic cards) and so on. After 10 years of collecting them, they have become the unmistakable vessels of recurring memories and images of the power of the surprises, fantasies and challenges lived through.

Among them, one telephone card (from Germany) carrying the illustration of a mysterious mouth, with fleshy, inviting lips, was to inspire the composition by the artist of a series of canvases, sculptures and objects, a series which has now been defined by European critics as the "luminous symphony of the mouth", in which several pieces are also converted into roses and hearts. In her work, Christina combines the techniques of traditional painting and the graphic resources of computers.

The collection of her new creations is being shown in Paris and Berlin, at two simultaneous exhibitions with the same name, Passed, Gathered, with the same success as she encountered in Brussels, where the show was presented in October.

In Paris, most of the 40 canvases of different formats, with prices varying between US$50.00 and US$900.00, and the objects modeled in quartz and jasper (US$500 each), were acquired by personalities such as the Empress Farah Diba, the Jordanian princess Haya Bin Hussein, writer Jean d'Ormesson, of the French Academy, at the opening of the show at Galerie Debret, near the Champs Elysées.

At the busy vernissage, amid the "fire" which spread through the gallery, with the artist's mouths, roses, painted hearts and scarlet sculptures - the color "evokes passion, sensuality and also religious sentiments" - she was asked by French critics to explain whether her husband, Paulo Coelho, had any influence on her "creative alchemy".

Relaxed, Christina confirmed Paulo's influence, above all through the religious symbolism which impregnates his literary work, "in my way I too cultivate the same signs, since I too am mystical". She added that he always suggests colors and forms, that through him she discovered the Pyrenees, the pleasure and use of painting outdoors, since nature, with her lights, hues and reliefs, always interferes with the compositions. "And anyway, we've been married 22 years, and a reciprocal relationship is only natural."

Nor did she hesitate when she was asked whether she "leaned on Paulo's fame", in presenting her art. She said: "Yes, I do, but in a positive way and with great care, since his fame can open doors, but can also be a two-edged blade. Otherwise I'm very simple and easy. On the 23rd I was 50 and at this age it would be indecent to be pushy."

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