It’s important to celebrate the fact that such simple means can still be the place to interrogate the nature of vision, subjectivity and the contemporary moment, because for many years, the idea that painting could possess purpose and potential has been mired in uncertainty and self-doubt. It’s especially important when it comes to the work of Alicia Paz, a painter who for over a decade has persistently and diligently examined the report of painting’s apparent death, and through calm and open reflection, found it to be greatly exaggerated. It’s easy to forget that in the mid 1990s, when Paz’s practice as a painter was first taking shape, contemporary painting was still dogged by the post-modernist critique of painting’s authenticity that had taken hold in the previous decade. At that time, everything about painting was a cause for doubt: post-modernism had extensively challenged modernist painting’s claim to be the privileged site of authentic expression and expressivity, the stale modernist dogma of the (male) expressive artist; meanwhile, the currency of semiological and linguistic concepts of meaning revealed that painting was a set of codes and conventions like any other, and that forms of representation could be appropriated and reprocessed; and simultaneously, photography’s apparent dominance and cultural power seemed to relegate painting to the subordinate status of an antique and redundant technology.

That was only a decade or so ago, and those problems no longer seem quite as important or as impassable now as they did then. Indeed, it’s tempting to see a great resurgence of confidence in the potential of painting since the turn of the millennium. Significantly, many painters since then have made an unapologetic return to the sensuous and aesthetic possibilities of painting, while others have reasserted the medium as a space in which emotional intensity and immediacy can be materialised, or in which an energetic encounter with popular culture and contemporary experience can be articulated. In other words, painting today seems a lot less embarrassed about itself.

And yet this sense of newfound confidence seems in many ways too easy, as if almost wilfully ignorant of the critical problems that were once legitimately aimed at painting. And it is this shifting context which makes Alicia Paz’s painting all the more interesting, precisely because she has steadfastly refused to follow the fashionable return to painting’s more naïve pleasures, preferring a more reflective and careful exploration of the still-valuable lessons that post-modern critiques of painting have yielded. Indeed, what is significant in Paz’s work is how it deals with the trouble of painting not as a set of dead-ends and failures from which nothing can be retrieved, but as a set of valid lessons to be learnt from and assimilated, in order to make painting even more conscious of the traps that lead to the repetition of naïve modes of expressionism or of exaggerated notions of painting’s cultural authenticity and autonomy. By playing out the scepticism of self-critical painting in practice, Paz has honed a more substantial and grounded understanding of how ideas such as subjective expression and formal authenticity actually remain possible in painting, without resorting to self-ironising nostalgia or wilful amnesia.

We might understand this by looking at how Paz’s earlier paintings contrast with more recent works. Take for example the early Painting Allegories series from 1994-1998. The Allegories paintings present a complex reflection on how a painting might be understood as ‘self-conscious’, and how we, as spectators, become part of that critical self-reflection. In each painting, we are presented with a representation of another painting, superimposed with another plane or layer of visual information, which represents in various ways the technical acts of painting and drawing. So in Colossus (1995), we are faced with a faithful rendering of Goya’s The Colossus (1808-1812). But on top of this has been painted the image of a pink, battery-operated toy rabbit, which is itself busy ‘painting over’ Goya’s masterpiece with a paint roller. Colossus may at first appear to be a cynical comment on how all painting might be reducible to a senseless, mechanical and repeatable act, entirely disconnected from any possibility of emotional expression or reception. And yet this first suggestion does not ring true. There is a difference between the ambition and imaginative vision of Goya’s The Colossus and the rabbit’s inane act of obliteration. While it is possible to see the originality of the Goya painting as something subsumed by the system of reproducibility and repetition, it is nevertheless qualitatively different to the futile action of the painter-rabbit. History has provided a further bizarre twist to Paz’s painting; in 2008, the Prado Museum announced that there was good evidence to suggest that The Colossus was not a work by Goya, but by his pupil, Asensio Juliá. What is interesting here is that Paz does not insist on fetishising the virtue of uniqueness and authenticity in painting; instead, she pits one form of reproducibility against another. Instead of the defeatist acceptance that authentic expression can no longer be guaranteed by painting, Paz instead encourages us to consider how all forms of reproduction are not equal. In other words, we are forced to reconsider the qualitative difference of images, even when painting is threatened by the prospect of its uniqueness being reproduced. We are the paradox that while painterly uniqueness is now reproducible, it may nevertheless still continue to offer strong aesthetic and affective possibilities, which depend on the critical reflection of the painter-as-subject, and not the mindless reproduction of automata.

The Goya controversy is therefore also interesting because it usefully highlights an important ongoing concern in Paz’s work, regarding the nature of individual subjectivity and its relation to the act of painting. In the Allegories paintings the ‘subject’ of the painting – not the representational content, but the artist who makes the image – has become multiple. In Paz’s Allegories there are at least two painters; the painter who paints the image that forms the ground of the work and the painter who paints what appears superimposed. Paz’s act as a painter is to act as several painters; rather than merely being an issue of stylistic eclecticism and the ironic appropriation of past styles, Paz’s paintings are inhabited by several artists simultaneously – the past painter and the painter of the present. While the Allegories paintings operate in the language of their moment – of late post-modernist paintings and its fascination with the arbitrary and transferable nature of images as signs – they nevertheless make a slight but important shift of emphasis in how we are supposed to witness the painting as the product of a single subject – the painter. Rather than the stylistic eclecticism that assumes that all past styles are part of a ‘lexicon’ that can be plundered with indifference and impunity, Paz’s Allegories are the encounter between one painter and another, which is infused by a sense of conflict between the maker of the original and the one who defaces it. The key here is that this encounter is deeply subjective, that is to say that we are in no doubt about the intentions of these different painters, subjects who we assume to be present.

Instead of being deconstructive and ironic, Paz’s work focuses on how subjectivity might be made manifest in the painted image – even as something divided or multiple – a theme continued in the second Painting Allegories series. In those, traditional painted ceramic figurines are depicted painting the backgrounds of the paintings, painting over themselves, or painting details around them. The humour of these is that the inanimate painted figure has become a painter – a maker and a subject – even of its own obliteration. Of course, we are fully aware that there is only one painter involved here – Paz herself – but these paintings suggest that not only is painting necessarily a collective undertaking, but that any painter is already involved in the subjectivities of her peers and antecedents.

This attention to the mutability of subjectivity becomes increasingly apparent in Paz’s more recent works, painted since 2002, in which the multiplicity of visual codes and painterly subjectivity are fused with an even more explicit statement about the nature of subjectivity itself. In the series Apocalypse and Utopia, Monsters and Artists, Mountains and Trees series, Paz turns the question of the split or divided subject into a reflection on the difference between the human and the inhuman. It is also in these paintings that Paz starts to focus predominantly on the female protagonist and the feminine as subject. In the paintings of both the Apocalypse and Utopia and the Monsters and Artists series, Paz inserts various depictions of women into scenes of absurd conflict. The images of women Paz chooses are those already mediated by mass culture – the little girl’s toy doll, or images of movie stars and celebrities culled from the pages of gossip magazines, or the heroines of old-fashioned comic strips. In the paintings of Apocalypse and Utopia, these reified expressions of feminine subjectivity are surrounded by equally fragmented antagonists – male sci-fi villains and goofy cartoon characters. Nobody, the paintings seem to suggest, is anything but an image or a cipher of themselves. And yet, as in her earlier paintings, Paz turns these visions of a fractured or a fragmented subjectivity, in which all subjects are reduced to the stereotypes of the mass-media, into a vision of possible new subjectivities. This is most evident in the Monsters and Artists series, which present us with a host of creatures who are part woman, part monster and part artist. These extraordinary female figures, whose faces are built into the most exotic mutant accumulations of paint and jewels, astronaut outfits or the bodies of frog-like aliens, are all masters of the aesthetic tools of the painter – brushes, paints and easels. All of them confront the spectator as active subjects of their own destiny, wielding their brushes as weapons. They may not be the usual vision of femininity in painting, but nor are they monstrous or grotesque. Instead they present us with the image of the new painter, reassembled from the ruins of the Modernist, male heroic artist. These are future forms of artist; feminine, cyborg, post-terrestrial, post-mutant and super-human.

The fantasy of the feminine as a harbinger of a new type of subjectivity comes to its most recent development in Paz’s Mountains series, and in her most recent Trees paintings, such as Weeping Medusa and Witches’ Coven (2008). In these latest paintings, Paz’s feminine subjects become the inhabitants of fantastical and exotic landscapes, or become fused and combined with organic life. But these strange and unsettling visions of tree-women and monster-women, where the natural-organic merges with the feminine-human are also the fusion of these subjects with painting itself. Weeping Medusa, in her acidic multi-coloured raiment, is a woman-tree made of paint, and she weeps pigment. If traditional Western painting sought to hide the materiality of the paint, and Modernist painting sought to reveal and to emphasise it, the conceptual split between matter and image was dependent on an idea of matter and the material world which was other than paint. Paz instead suggests a perverse and playful abolition of this distinction – the world she proposes is made only of paint, and of the accumulated images that our culture has produced of the world. Integrated into organic and inorganic matter (from which paint itself originates) Paz’s feminine mutants are another sort of allegory; of how we, as subjects, are transformed by aesthetic experience, and how aesthetic experience can make us more aware of how subjectivity is itself shaped by the world it finds itself in. In one of her latest paintings, Baba, Baby, Babel (2008), a sort of tower, composed of a mesh-work of multicoloured stripes, and with the bare indication of a cartoon face at its summit, floats in a child-like, Utopian horizon of sunshine and gentle clouds. It’s not clear what this entity is – part building, part city, part figure, part world... Babel, the place where humanity came together to build a tower to heaven, only to be cursed by god with a multitude of languages. This odd tower-figure, with its vague echoes of old roller-coasters, of the science-fiction architecture of the great World Fairs, or of Tatlin’s Monument to V.I. Lenin, suggests another kind of hybridity – that of the multiplicity of cultures that now start to contribute to our common experience. For Paz, an itinerant artist who has resettled periodically, a sense of internationalism and rootlessness informs her understanding of painting’s polyglot aspect – its ability to operate between languages, to assimilate and translate one visual culture to another. If the story of Babel projects language as a divisive moment that imprisons people in their different cultures, then Paz’s tower proposes a reunification in which difference is transcended by a new, polyglot universalism. Here, the multiplicity of languages and of cultures, of painterly languages and styles, and of a subject which is also itself made up of a multitude, is seen not as a burden but as something full of optimism and possibility: Not a single individual subject, finite and unchanging, but a multitude of subjects, coming together, fragmenting, merging, in formation, always unfinished...the subject of painting.

JJ Charlesworth
December 2008