Lidzie Alvisa is an organically materialist artist. Society is the leitmotif that alters her creation. Flesh and human body, along with the antinomy pleasure/pain, are the most frequent tropes in her images. Her procedure stars from photography and its manipulation. She usually develops her work in the field of installation, although she has also experimented with the possibilities of drawing and engraving.
In her artistic work the naked body is represented as a bunch of sensations, or even better, a sensor of cultural nature phenomena. It is accompanied by signs of aggression and their correlative impressions, always mordacious, of suffering. The body attracts, just as a powerful magnet would do it, the metallic thorns of a shattered crown. Before her pictures, it is almost impossible to forget the tortuous, merciful and magnanimous story of the Christians’ great redeemer. It seems that sin is not extinct. It seems its manifestations and consequences are immanent in us.
Such metaphoric figure strongly condensed in the network of symbols that Alvisa is ready to build, expresses the sacrifices and tribulations that come with everyday existence, our vulnerability and the finitude that defines and torments us as mortals. But the allegory of pain is also presented as enunciation of the disturbing and slippery figure of pleasure. Not in a sexual connotation, not as experience, but as an abstraction. The torture of the thorns, just like in Prometheus’s epical sacrifice, is unchanging and humdrum; it is repeated every day with the same intensity. That is the reason why Alvisa recreates it at the same time as an extraordinary atonement, as a rhythm that gives life, sense and sustenance.
Alvisa strives to lead us through the multiple analysis of human existence as a cultural phenomenon. To do so, she empties history, memory and presence of their mythological contents, so they are devoid of their sublime and Dionysian quality. Her dialect is the chaste figure of the absence of epical contents, a sign of present-day non-commitment with modern culture’s great redeeming stories, with the myth of a glorious past and ecstatic future.
It is true that a certain tone of complaint seems to appear in this artist’s poetry, which is associated to conditions and discourse about gender. There is no doubt, the naked bodies of her artworks are definitely feminine; there are not few the allusions she makes to women. But this must be understood as an indicator of self-reference.
It cannot be denied that, without being intentional or objective, she manages to replace the classical redeeming hero’s magnanimous figure for that one of a sacrilegious heroin, or even more, anti-heroine, which articulates the stories of redemption, settled in the glorious figures of Prometheus –provision–, and Christ –salvation–, in the body of sin –fatal, curious, seductive Eve, condemned to a dosed and warned pain. But her poetry is primarily human; and we must remember that humanity has the appearance of a woman.
