Alicia Paz | Texts

With diamond encrusted creatures emerging from a bright primordial waste, silver webs that trap portraits of glamorous young women, and fictional landscapes that offer up outmoded utopian futures, Alicia Paz’s recent work represents a shift in her use of painted iconography. Essentially an itinerant artist, Paz was born in Mexico and spent lengthy periods in California and Paris before moving to London, and her work feeds on an eclectic mixture of cultural influences, affected as much by graffiti or comic books – such as Little Lulu and the Argentinian Mafalda – as by art historical genres such as Rococo, Surrealism, Art Brut and Expressionism. This eclectic mixing of styles, in an art that at first sight throws out a number of fairly straightforward visual conundrums, in reality creates characters that form surrogate actors or puppets to Paz’s shifting sense of cultural identity and suggests a strange and clairvoyant form of ventriloquism.

Many of Paz’s collaged characters are artists or authors in their own right, and appear as self-made entities, as dissimulations that trace a transformation from artist to fictional counterpart to secondary work of art. Paz has said that she wishes to express a sense of self-doubt, to underline ‘through the visual mechanics of painting, the illusory and subjective nature of all representations’, whilst affirming an optimism towards ‘art’s inherent transcendental possibilities.’ The interesting thing about Paz’s further breakdown of formal devices, or reliance on a fixation with a melancholy historiography of memory and forgetting through the use of photographic source material, is her recent concern for a further ‘coming into being’ through the process of painting itself.

Dawn (2005) describes this shift eloquently. An amphibian figure emerges from waste ground at twilight. Set in a brightly coloured post-apocalyptic or pre-human world, there’s a contrast of humour and drama between the monster’s feminine archetype of beauty (a half recognisable celebrity portrait taken from a lifestyle magazine) and its stereotype of the ‘ugly’, in its posture and uncanny physicality. The representational and formless qualities of the paint, and its modelling of abject material, trash or mud, also jar with its polar opposite; the depiction of precious treasure, or valuable and painted gems that appear studded into the work. With its title signifying the first light of day and indicating the name of its female character, it also plays on the B-movie melodrama of zombie films, such as George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) as well as their humorous representation of reified consciousness in late capitalist society. Whereas in her previous work Paz expressively re-imbues and interrogates the already artificial nature of eighteen century German Rococo figurines and their post-colonial status in relation to stereotypes of race, class and culture, these new works riff on self and identity less in terms of a masking or a destructive iconoclasm, but through a morphing, evolution, or subliminal emergence from a post-cognitive swamp.

This balance of stark alienation and organic empathy is reinforced through the use of textual fragments and language, the letter ‘K’ appearing emblazoned between the glittering creature’s chest as a direct reference to Kafka’s character in Metamorphosis. Identity shows a flexibility to move in time – to metamorphose like K.

Paz’s mannered characters speak as much of contemporary fashion, collage, Pop Art and Surrealism as they do of horror, literature and science fiction. By presenting a figurine as a monster artist with veins protruding from its legs, When the Machine Stops (2004) throws a nod back to Frida Kahlo, Paz’s Mexican Catholic background, and by turns Japanese cartoons, which appear heavily on Mexican television. Similarly, with it’s painted drips and eyes protruding from the picture plane, Untitled (Melting) (2004) points as much to Surrealism as it does to Warhol and Pop.

In one sense we can see these paintings as an uncanny source of life: Paz’s eyes and gems focus on a point of light where our gaze can be reflected and returned back to us from a point outside of ourselves. For Paz, reflection means frozen mortification as much as it does reciprocity or mutual affirmation of existence. If her work is a painting about painting, where pictorial elements uncomfortably disrupt and reinvent themselves time and again, it’s because the fixity and stasis of their origins consciously slip into an altered state through the works’ own self-definition. In this respect the openness of Paz’s work is caught in an uncanny awkwardness, melodrama and grace that belies its initial appearance.