A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience - Catalog - Page 44
CANDIDA ALVAREZ
I use personal knowledge to build magical dimensions.
My work is more about what holds it together than what
it ultimately looks like. Drawing, collage, photography,
and painting play important roles in how I organize my
work formally, although I am motivated by a process that
I describe as an “active search” in which I incorporate
material from my immediate world and everyday
experience and then arrange it in a way that is organic
and will be surprising to me. This allows me to construct
paintings that are composed of multiple, individual
elements that are ultimately dismantled in the resulting
fictional space of the work. Patterns on the floor, memories
of my childhood, and photographs that are significant to
me all function as ways and means of bringing my world
as well as what’s in front of me directly into my work. I
arrive at my paintings by manipulating the space between:
for example, positive and negative, and/or abstraction
and representation. It is in this “in-between space” that
I dismantle truths to assemble fictions. These fictions
are a function of the painting process. As an artist whose
primary mediums are painting and drawing, I am driven to
mine my experience to discover a container for visual form.
Forty years ago, the experience of witnessing light stream
from a stained glass window was critical to my current
interpretation of abstraction. Strong graphic curves of
lead hold countless numbers of facets that frame a larger
narrative, a story that was mysteriously obliterated as rays
of colored light projected forward to create an ephemeral
fleeting space that appeared backlit—like a computer
screen. Pathways such as this that move from
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Candida Alvarez in her studio, 2020
