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Lucía Vidales: Night During the Day (2019)
Artists:
Lucía Vidales, Pita Amor, Leonora Carrington, Olga Costa, María Izquierdo, Joy Laville, and Cordelia Urueta
Night During the Day is a project by Lucía Vidales (Mexico City, 1986) in dialogue with the collection and historical archive of the Galería de Arte Mexicano. Vidales produced a series of paintings and functional sculptures based on a revision of ideas surrounding the nude, landscape, still life, and vanitas present in the work of 20th-century Mexican women artists. The result is an original body of work that brings together sensual and grotesque gestures to create an imaginary in which strange creatures coexist within abstract settings. As a reflection on the condition of being a painter, color and form demand attention to the darkness of their circumstances.
Strange wild creatures… and yet, civilization—which is no such thing. (1)
A vase holding a bouquet of fresh flowers is a brutal commentary on death. Though colorful and fragrant, freshly cut flowers are corpses that will turn to dust. The passage of time is merciless: a still life in decay becomes a vanitas when the flowers wither and attract flies to their rot.
In Vidales’s work, time passes, unfolds, and seeps. It corrupts figures, fragments bodies, and blurs the line between night and day. Time is not confined to the surface of the canvas nor contained within a vessel. Like a black sun, it breaks down light and, therefore, color. Vidales has constructed an imaginary of incomplete humans and monstrous phenomena inhabiting delirious landscapes. They are sordid and somber scenes—tragedies rendered in beautiful, luminous colors. Her works are strange wild creatures that return the gaze with eyes bulging from their sockets.
Cheerful, sensual, slightly melancholic, a bit comic. (2)
Vidales’s work underscores the sublime within the terrible. However, tragedy is neither the motive nor the measure of all things. Figures merge into their chromatic attributes in a kind of sinister harmony. Despite being broken and wretched, the bodies dance, move, leap, and revel in disaster.
(1) Cordelia Urueta describing one of the paintings included in her exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno de México in 1970. This was the first solo exhibition by a woman at this institution.
(2) Jorge Ibargüengoitia describing the work of Joy Laville.