SHIFTING SKINS Matthew Allen – Inma Femenía – Lyz Parayzo

About

Three artists who shed their skin, creating interfaces with new worlds: magnetic and glacial surfaces or bark-like cortexes that are contorted to reveal an unexpected and alienating identity. They shed their Skin, the epidermis, the surface that contains us, offering only a glimpse of our exterior selves to the world.

Matthew Allen (Auckland, New Zealand 1981), stimulates the material to generate a change of state. Taking on the appearance of a metal sheet, the surface looks cold and silent, but it is a trick! The enigma reveals itself between blurred space and sudden flashes: the real nature of this skin – which appears to rest on the linen cloth –, is still unclear.

As Allen applies an innumerable series of graphite powder layers, the work reveals itself to its creator, appearing only once it has reached its finite formal state. The powder, compacted through a process of obsessively polishing the surface, becomes a solid, taut, almost mirror-like skin. It has a cosmetic appearance which satisfies the gaze that watched it during its unveiling.

Inma Femenía (Valencia, Spain 1985) focuses her artistic research on the manipulation of digital information. Frames of footage taken from video surveillance circuits are mutated, manipulated and transposed onto transparent PVC film: in "Version" this new skin is forced into display cases with powerful, almost violent, iron profiles.

In her “In Tension” series Femenía constructs a metallic epidermis dotted with colors extrapolated from digital images and chromatic gradients, then manipulates and crumples the aluminum sheet using the weight of her own body: hers is a gesture that recalls the convulsions of a birth evoked by the natural rubber cord which highlights the concept of an umbilical connection.

Lyz Parayzo (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 1994) builds sharp objects designed to lacerate and cut apart. With the “Bixinha”, while paying homage to Lygia Clark's “Bichos” sculptures, the artist evokes razor blades and weapons of self-defence using serrated metal sheets. In other works, suspended from the ceiling, rotating spirals and sinuous saw blades turn pink under the changing spotlights: these are revolving, armored containers exhibit an inside and an outside with every turn, they are the premise or the ambition of a transformation that twitches supine and warns menacingly, retreating and recoiling, in “Dizziness of Anesthesia.”

Parayzo's work is strongly autobiographical, revealing its close connection to the queer community and the theme of gender transition. The lacerations necessary for this change of skin as well as those resulting from the daily violence suffered by this community are at the center of his research.

                                                                                                                                Daniela Barbieri

Shifting skins  

Matthew Allen – Inma Femenía – Lyz Parayzo

Curated by Daniela Barbieri