Lidzie Alvisa

[…] Lidzie Alvisa makes her irruption into the 21^st Century with a different visuality. It was around these years that her work showed considerable qualitative impulse when she stopped appealing to the traditional crafts like engraving and drawing and broached new languages like installation and photography. Despite the fact that she had already been working on the last one, it was then that she granted it more relevance, particularly due to the sculptural breadth she gave to it. What could have been pure tautology gradually in the beginning gained greater dimension when she linked the representation of her body to parallel experiences at world level.

Starting with small stories, she reflects on the meta-chronicle of “life.” For example, in her series Imanes the body becomes support and at the same time symbolical capital. In her treatment of the mutilated corporal image she goes way beyond the represented genre, because although her first steps were given in the field of womanhood, later they moved until reaching the ontological concept of human being as foundational value. This time the body fragments emancipate themselves, gain relevance when they oppose the pins, which come to be a perfectly traceable symbol in a large part of her artistic production and which in turn stand as a repeated motif in her first works, in connection with practices inherited from the family, like sewing. Said continuity in a certain way ensures the permanence in her work of that spirit of the nineties in which the return to the pleasure of handwork in art was a permanent element. She plays with the idea of their daily role –as essential instrument for seamstresses– and de-automates them, giving them new meaning by reinserting them into black boxes, this time with a new function: instruments of aggression placed in pleasure zones momentarily turned into places of pain: depersonalized pubis, buttocks and vertebrae that have been (self) assaulted, without ignoring the erotic tint present in the series.

When insisting on the representation of the feminine body, Lidzie Alvisa generally draws attention to profound issues such as the visual imagery with which women have been represented. In the background of these works is an ethic and esthetic discourse, since beyond the esthetic dimension she grants to the visual surface, far from being indulging and sweetening she shows the aggressiveness required by women to face the history largely constructed by the paradigm of the modern subject; a history in which marginalization has been a key element to define women, very much in spite of the attempts to tarnish this approach unleashed by the feminist trend since the decade of 1970.

If on one side the signs Lidzie uses to represent women are stereotypes –since she understands them under the same codes imposed by the male-centered standpoint– she appeals to them with utmost consciousness, pretending to maintain the closest analogical relation with the real reference in order to obtain a much more direct communication with the receiver and loaded with a stronger denounce element without obviating the potential of ambiguity in art. Magnets on the pubis –fatal attraction as mechanism of pain and pleasure–; pins that form a cross– the cross of being a woman–; pins that cover the winding landscape of the feminine body or form the horizon line on it speak to us next to violently silenced mouths, eyes that cannot/will not see, ears that cannot/will not listen. Lidzie widens her representation of the body from the feminine standpoint to that of the male as social being. Situations in which, as in her diptychs, she delves deeply into the crudeness of bipolar relations and insists on the staging of those metaphysical truths exercised from the power of the one who can silence or attack the other […]. ¹

1. Julienne López, “Speaking of Intimacy… A Circumnavigation of Lidzie Alvisa’s Work,” Artecubano, no. 1, 2015.