Cristina BanBan’s Shy Harlequin

Cristina BanBan’s Shy Harlequin (2025) captures the artist at a moment of evocative fusion—where personal narrative, performative femininity, and painterly audacity converge. Painted during the same period as the works made for her first institutional exhibition, at the Museum of Fine Arts at the Palace of Charles V in the Alhambra complex in Granada, Spain, the present painting channels the tragicomic spirit of Federico García Lorca while retaining BanBan’s fiercely contemporary language of form. The figure at its center, rendered in urgent sweeps of oil and streaks of exposed canvas, oscillates between vulnerability and assertion. Her body, monumental and unidealized, tilts inward in an intimate gesture of self-touch, yet stands defiant in scarlet heels—an accessory BanBan often uses as a cipher for power and pageantry. Here, BanBan’s brushwork surges between density and void, pushing flesh into abstraction. The title’s invocation of the Harlequin—a traditional trickster and performer—reinforces the sense of masquerade and emotional duplicity. Like Lorca’s women, this figure is not one thing but many: seductive and shy, theatrical and introspective. She wears a ribbon in her hair like a stage prop, and the stage itself seems to flicker behind her through a setting of purples, reds, and a lattice structure that hints at interiority and confinement. BanBan’s palette, along with her forms, straddles beauty and distortion. The body becomes both subject and landscape, a site of power and projection. What emerges is a portrait of modern femininity that is both diaristic and mythic. In Shy Harlequin, BanBan deepens her study of what it means to be seen, to perform, and to possess one’s own image. It is a painting that does not merely depict a figure—it stages a reckoning.