Quite often, it is these very figures or characters that make the painting. As it is quite certain that it is based on their assemblage that the picture is constructed, the recurring presence, in several of the works, of the figure of a painter in the act of painting informs us of the analytical dimensions of the signs evoked.

It is an experience of painting that draws upon all sorts of images, digests them, and is then translated into a mise en oeuvre of the creative process, portrayed as a series of painted “freeze-frames”. In her recent works, Alicia Paz turns to increasingly more disparate elements that stem from radically different worlds. These signs of iconic signs are treated as pictures of pictures. It is not a question, for example, of representing the witch of Walt Disney’s version of Snow White, but rather an image of the witch of Walt Disney’s version of Snow White. Nor is it a question of making painterly marks, but rather of representing images of painterly marks.

Equally, however, these figures are fragments of paintings: each being executed in a particular manner. Various modes and techniques co-exist on the surface. They are always finely mastered, to the point of also seeming to be images.

Although inserted within a narrative frame, a probable scenario, a quasi-theatrical mise en scène, the assembled elements retain their autonomy. Their isolation. Their essential otherness. Worse, they affirm and proclaim it. The sum of their strangeness composes paradoxical and improbable images. With, however, a concern for resemblance. But we are still dealing with an affair of décor, of figures, of actions, of a construction of successive planes. These elements are figurative, (and on more than one account, as they always represent something) but above all, they are pictorial events, posing, as ever, the question of the painting.