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FAD Magazine covers contemporary art – News, Exhibitions and Interviews reported on from London

Alicia Paz at School Gallery: Value and Trees

The more that orthodox places close in challenging market and cost conditions – Blain | Southern being the latest – the more reason there is to appreciate alternatives spaces. School Gallery, attached to a studio complex near Wimbledon, and managed by artist Michael Hall, is one such example. Currently it has a concise show by the Mexican-born London artist Alicia Paz: two monochrome paintings in ceramic-linked hues – the red of iron oxide and the blue of cobalt oxide – either side of a giant ceramic necklace titled ‘Love’ in acknowledgement of how it unites the paintings either side. Both paintings show trees, which Paz, talking to Craig Burnett – formerly, as it happens, of Blain ! Southern –  identified as a particularly rich subject which had appealed to her ever since, as a child, she decorated the family Christmas tree. Alicia mentioned how their root systems mirror what is above ground, so as much is hidden as is on view; how roots imply origins linking to her interest in hybridity; how both languages and families are often depicted diagrammatically as trees.

All of which feeds into paintings which fully exploit the load-bearing ability of trees by filling their branches with characters and props, including some ‘real items’ as well as paintings made from found images of puppets – on the red tree (The Lake House, 2020)  – and gargoyles – on the blue tree (A Spiritual Visitation, 2020) which housed the people in her family, such as the in-laws above!  The resulting cacophony of voices, said Paz, was a ‘chattering community of neurotic characters’ which evoked the multi-layered aspects of the typically modern identity. The ceramic necklace also referred to Maupassant’s short story ‘The Necklace’, in which a woman’s life is eaten away by guilt, having lost a diamond necklace she had borrowed, only for her to be told when she eventually organises recompense that the stones had been fakes. Trees, however, as we are increasingly aware, are truly valuable…

Art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent sees a lot of shows: we asked him to jot down whatever came into his head

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