Solo exhibition “Explorations au féminin”
Château de Haroué, 25 mai – 3 novembre 2024
Photos : © Alicia Paz, © Benjamin Gavaudo / Centre des monuments nationaux
Bénédicte curated the exhibition Alicia Paz - Explorations au Féminin at Château de Haroué in close collaboration with the artist and the team at Centre des Monuments Nationaux. Paz's work, which celebrates the achievements of courageous women, and her vocabulary rooted in the decorative arts of art, particularly the Rococo period, were resonant with the Château de Haroué, an 18th-century jewel and the personal history of its former owner Minnie de Beauvau-Craon who fought bravely to save the château from ruin.
The exhibition consisted in about sixty recent works including the multiple portraits of women of the ongoing series Juntás (Together) 2020 - present, where Paz celebrates the struggles and remarkable, often little-known, life stories of those who have inspired and supported her along the way: writers, artists, singers, scientists or simply friends.
Her vocabulary freely combines decorative arts and crafts, baroque and photography, materials and trompe-l’œil, creating a poetic universe conducive to a shared imaginary conversation between these women, across different eras and continents.
Feminism asserts itself here as camaraderie between women, a source of support and a producer of individual identity.
The monumental diptych Laughing Wall, Wailing Wall, 2016 and Tears of Laughter, 2019 - 2024, represents one figure laughing while the other one is crying. However, on closer inspection, one notices that the opposite emotions are depicted on the inside of each figure. Like in a comedy-tragedy, the work tells how complicated human beings are as they show one emotion on the outside and feel completely the opposite on the inside. These tile walls have a lot of weeds, cracks, the soil; these paintings are also dealing with the ageing process : best to laugh and to cry about it! Here, the artist is thinking of the wall, painting as a wall, painting as a mask, and also painting as a ruin, with great humour and in a grotesque style reminiscent of Arcimboldo. This diptych could also be read as a mockery of the authority of historical portrait painting.
In Marines I and II (2024), fragments are like waves, overlapping one another with strips of golden foam, and bearing representations of azulejos from a different regions of the world as well as references to the sea. The mermaids, hybrids of animal and human, emerge more and more as a feminist symbol of otherworldly autonomy, strange and sometimes frightening...
Paz is interested in connecting the human with animals, or human and plants, especially in this time of climate change crisis.
A small selection of older works punctuated the tour of the château, as nods to the place and its history, such as the portraits of masked flower-women in the Dark Flora series (2011 - 2012), evocative of the libertine atmosphere of the parties organised at Haroué in the 18th century by the ravishing Marie-Françoise-Catherine de Beauvau-Craon. More information about Alicia Paz
A brochure with an interview between Alicia Paz and Sébastien Gokalp, conservateur en chef du patrimoine, directeur du Musée de Grenoble was published by Editions du Patrimoine, 2024
