205.7 x 180.3 x 66.0 cm
Estoy Bien, an exhibition of new Air Paintings by Candida Alvarez. This is Alvarez’s first exhibition with Monique Meloche and her first solo gallery exhibition in Chicago.
Essay
By Melissa Messina
In Candida Alvarez’s first exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery, we are stopped in our tracks. An experiential engagement, Estoy Bien is a dramatic sequencing of seven large-scale, double-sided paintings hung from metal frameworks. We carefully weave our bodies through the abstracted passageways Alvarez has created, traversing a psychogeographic space, a place not located on a map but rather one that transpires somewhere between experience and memory. And we do so willingly, guided by her compositional sure-footedness. We are transported by the artist’s intense palette, striking tactility, and seductive imagery, emboldened by a sense of wonder. Serving as visual metaphors for the ways we navigate the obstacles of the world, these exuberant paintings, with their aluminum armatures, become signposts for that elusive place where internal and external influences converge.
This painting series originates from the fragments of Alvarez’s 2017 public art project, a 200-foot long digital painting that hung at the Chicago Riverwalk. Proofs from her imagery—an index of former works juxtaposed digitally on PVC mesh, a material chosen to allow for air flow— are reimagined here as new abstract sculptural paintings. In these works, Alvarez brings her ongoing conversation between abstraction and text, gesture and shape, color and light, to another level, adding a dialogue between digital color and paint, painting’s surface and support, back and front. They began after a sojourn to India cut short by news of her father’s death and her subsequent travel to Puerto Rico for his funeral. Three months later, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island where her mother and sister remained. In Chicago, Alvarez felt compelled to make art but was too grief-stricken to return to the bustling world to locate materials. She found refuge in her studio and challenged herself with the economy of what was there. The urgent moving of her body through time and space—her head swirling with the sites and sounds of her travels, vivid memories, and layered emotions—created a feeling of liminality, of being on a threshold. This intermediate, in-between space became the impetus for the series of what she describes as “air paintings” that “hold space for feeling.”
On this woven industrial material, digitally printed with details of her paintings from the past twenty years, Alvarez began manipulating, collaging, and expanding her original imagery in visual palimpsests. The resulting works are in many ways an encyclopedic view of her art making. And in the process of working with this accumulated material, the series became a conversation: an artist self-comforting while also confronting her relationship to time and the remnants of its passage. Estoy Bien, or “I Am Well,” was the quiet mantra she repeated to herself as she made the first work in the series. Alvarez also recalled this phrase as one repeatedly transmitted from media outlets that scoured the remote areas of Puerto Rico post-hurricane—a message of hope reported by survivors and one she was all too relieved to hear from her own family. Working in her studio, she began responding to the mediated shapes and colors, countering the surfaces in a call-and-response with her own past mark-making, and using loaded words and symbols to generate the layered imagery. She describes the process as a “very physical and emotional experience” in which she felt her way through to total peace.
The inherent strength of this work is that it conveys so much without feeling overloaded. The paintingsbreathe and gently sway from the air that passes through the mesh, reinforcing their openness to meaning. These are unrelenting accumulations of referents that represent the dueling forces of internal emotion and external energies. Ambient pools of color overlaid with finer marks and textures create blur and sharpened focus. Like memory, or psychological and emotional states, these broad-reaching swaths are punctuated by masterful detail. The maelstrom also suggests the daily inundation of our fields of vision—the overload of imagery, information, and conflicting feelings we filter from our many screens.
They address the current simultaneity of human consciousness in which we are somehow everywhere and nowhere all at once. They feel akin to our cultural moment in which the world is both at our fingertips and just out of reach. Alvarez’s paintings, however, become places of comfort, as in them we land in harmonized atmospheres. The perforated surfaces—themselves screens—are window-like, also allowing light in. This distinction prompted Alvarez to thoughtfully respond to each side of the surface. In this intentional exposure, we witness in a painting what we often do not: process laid bare. As such, the works become a celebration of battles hard fought and hard won, in paint and in life. While carefully resolved, we intuit Alvarez’s journey through chance and plan, accident and intention, and see the result as optimistic, that she has somehow made sense ofit all and is reminding us to likewise “negotiate our presence in our world.”
While often map-like, the imagery does not point to specific locations. One side of a work can appear as rocky terrain with an aqueous ground on another, at once arid desert and reflecting pool. The paintings are instead psychological landscapes, created in vast arrays of colors, lines, and shapes, that recall the ways we can discover and grow in new environments. Alvarez also honors the vulnerable feeling of dislocation, of being in many places at once; and, by steadily working these surfaces she firmly plants a flag in that ever-shifting ground. For her, they embody “where I am and where I will be ... stretching coordinates, and leaping over time and space.” As with past works, the imagery harkens to personal, locational references, including Roman Catholic stained-glass windows, and the colors and flora of her beloved Puerto Rico. While often begun from autobiographical inspirations, however, it is through her use of abstraction, the symbolic and metaphorical language of color, form, and texture, that calls forth our empathy. Alvarez’s keen understanding of color in particular, its ability to create not only psychological but also physiological responses, coupled with the human scale of the works, permit us to examine them with our eyes as well as manage them with our bodies, furthering a dialogue between the internal and external.
Estoy Bien is a fitting title for the exhibition. In it we see an artist at the height of her capabilities. We find work that stands firm, that holds its space. And yet Alvarez’s work offers vulnerability. We see in her exploratory processes a willingness to fail, but it is evident by her developed prowess that she ultimately cannot. Her mark-making, imagery, use of scale, and materiality is finely tuned from years of raw experimentation and a passion for the painting process. Painting for Alvarez is the sieve through which life experiences and visual accumulations are filtered. The result is a polyvocal expression which conveys not only her time and place, but also our specific cultural moment. By addressing the complex inundations of filtered and lived experience through this personal expressionistic language, Alvarez makes painting feel more relevant than ever. As the world swirls, time speeds, thumbs swipe, and ads flash, in her work we find a balm. Hers is a ground where this source material lives harmoniously. The formal complexity and layered meaning in her work demonstrates a wisdom that comes from processing, synthesizing, and placing information. Her confident handling of paint represents a way to make sense of the scrambling, grappling, and negotiating we do in our daily lives. This series highlights Alvarez’s cultivated painting methodologies that combine binary forces—the universal and personal, the systematic and intuitive— to locate resolution. Altogether, the problem is put on a plane and dealt with until harmony is found. At a time when harmony and resolution are hard to come by, “Estoy Bien,” a visual mantra, guides the path.
Note: All quotes are taken from the author’s conversation with the artist, January 3, 2020.
