Easy Rider
Easy Rider presents a new body of work consisting of metal and resin sculptures, prints on aluminium, and a sound piece composed by Gediminas Žygus. Developed over the past year and informed by queer films such as Love Lies Bleeding and Titane and the works consider how the boundary between the organic and the industrial begins to blur, corrode, and ultimately collapse.
Rather than a dramatic transformation, Easy Rider offers something quieter but no less visceral: a slow alchemy. Flesh doesn’t disappear but becomes alloyed. Wounds are glossed over. Paez Armando’s process embraces the grotesque and the cinematic, which draws not only from body horror but from the prosthetic ingenuity of 1980s prop-making, when transformation was sculpted, weighty, built by hand creating sculptural environments that feel both seductive and unsettling. Through material excess and tactile precision, Easy Rider stages an encounter with a queer corporeality that is both futuristic and intimate.
Photography by Benjamin Schoonenberg
A small piece of shiny shiny metal stuck in between the teeth. She was talking to someone but this, this right here, takes precedence.
Her own tongue, trapped now, wriggling around the thing, spreading metal particles with each feel, poisoned like a purple worm. Her fingers get involved, ready to pry. She would continue to talk, incessantly, whilst taking her fingers deeper and deeper down her mouth, almost to her throat. Discourse and pleasure, a single motion. The uvula dangling, perversely between all those fingertips. They get stuck, become numb and the small piece is all but lost. They suddenly become aware of who they’re speaking to, and they pretend to regain interest in the conversa- tion. Gently, they remove their hands from their teeth. The fingertips are as blue and silver as the tongue. Drool falls between the jaws.
They can still feel it jammed in. A ravenous force. La sed, la sed, la sed.
Unequivocally dispersed, the conversation continues. But slowly, there again, there it stings, there it bothers, they feel a pulsing between the gums. The focus flickers again and she brings their finger back to their teeth. At first, shyly, a coyness that knows itself watched. But now her palms feel again that slightly different texture. And as soon as her fingertips make that discovery, they go on the attack, maddened. Now with little or no wariness, just bliss and pleasure and a fierce focus on what really matters, looking for that elusive thing. And now they are all drool, and pleasure, and searching.
A compulsion, they call it.
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Gut feeling
Gut Feeling is an installation combining sculpture and sound, probing the tension between the organic and the industrial, the fleshy and the mechanical. Rooted in the traditions of science fiction and horror, Gut Feeling draws from the aesthetics of body horror and the tactile language of special effects. Paez Armando’s sculptures employ materials like resin, silicone, and metal, creating forms that appear caught in a state of flux—stretching, oozing and hardening. Gut Feeling does not offer resolution but rather inhabits a space of ambiguity—where flesh meets machine, and where bodies, real or imagined, refuse to settle into fixed forms.
Photography by Benjamin Schoonenberg and Tommy Smits
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Marine Lover: Snakes & Metal
Marine Lover: Snakes & Metal is the second part of a series of exhibitions curated by Àngels Miralda.
In Moulting, silicone is stretched into a snakeskin formation and bound over a metal frame. The main floor piece is accompanied by a smaller wall piece, where the silicone is pierced by metal claws. This work continues previous investigations into monstrosity, and ideas of shapeshifting and transformation.
Photography by Franz Mueller Schmidt
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Marine Lover: Wax & Water
Marine Lover: Wax and Water is a duo show together with Abraham Kritzman, curated by Àngels Miralda.
"Abraham Kritzman and Violeta Paez have collaboratively produced a new body of work that references material transformation as well as imagery of alchemy. Using watercolour and wax, the production of these pieces follows the principle of shifting states of matter and the fluxes and flows of liquid paths. Alchemy produces codes of meaning in everyday things, and following this principle, Kritzman and Paez’s work uses the allegorical path of a sea-froth labyrinth to present an imaginative narrative of archetypal symbols. "
Press release, Àngels Miralda
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Longing blue
Wax
120 x 60 x 100 cm
Photography by Sander Van Wettum
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Baby
Wax, glass
60 x 40 x 30 cm
Photography by Sander Van Wettum
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Love revealed: or how to keep all this warmth at bay
This project centers around the work of Simeon Solomon, and the recovering of imagined or fantasized queer stories. It combines sculpture, performance and writing . The exhibition was marked by a series of performances and Spineless, a publication that accompanied the exhibition. It consists of works made of wax, metal, and various other materials along with performative interventions around the theme of queerness, monstrosity and corporeality. Science fiction films and speculative fiction are crucial to this work, not only as a source of inspiration but as a raw material.
Photography by Catalina Reyes Navarro
Script for performance - Part 1
Violeta begins reading:
Simeon Solomon painted Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene in 1864. Sappho’s eyes are closed, her whole face pressed adoringly against Erinna’s cheek. Sappho’s right hand gently grabs Erinna by the hip. Her hand cusped in Erinna’s hand and hidden just below the shoulder of her dress. Erinna’s gaze is absentminded, and her knee is bent, resting on top of Sappho’s leg.
While reading, Violeta signals to a piece on the floor. Sappho and Erinna, is a sculpture where that image is reproduced in concrete and combined with an alien-like blob. Violeta reads:
Simeon Solomon, who painted Sappho and Erina, was a Jewish British painter, known affectionately as the darling of the Pre-Raphaelites. Almost ten years after painting Sappho and Erina, in 1873, he was arrested and charged with attempting to commit sodomy in a public urinal in London. He was caught with an illiterate, 60-year-old stableman who probably suffered a harsher conviction due to his class. Although he kept painting, his career never recovered.
Joe is the keeper. She intently guards the snake head; that is the token. Eloy is the past. He should embody the dancer and choreographer Neil Bartlett which, in turn, embodies Simeon Solomon. Violeta is the narrator, the only one who directly addresses the audience. None of them smile. Their attitude is serious, solemn. Also mechanical, as if they were doing this series of steps every day.
Eloy and Joe stand in the balcony, above everyone, gazing to the front, looking past the windows. Violeta is downstairs with a mic, facing the audience directly who is seated.
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Spineless (publication)
Spineless (publication)
Riso printing
Designed and published by attempt press
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Queen, to you, a horse
Published in the context of a A friend of a friend, a book about rumour, gossip and anecdote, ‘Queen, to you, a horse’ recollects the story of Sappho, the Greek poet. Sappho’s biography and body of work is riddled with erasures, conflicting accounts and missing pieces.
‘Queen, to you, a horse’ takes different sources about Sappho to form a fragmented, and often self-contradicting account of her life, work and legacy with a particular focus on her position as a queer icon. It invites the reader to think about questions of veracity, fragmentation, omission and history.
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Spineless
Spineless is a queer retelling of the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus. Through an installation consisting of writing, video and sculpture, a fantasized narrative is constructed that shifts away from the heroic history of Orpheus and focuses on the relationship between Eurydice and the snake that bites her.
In this version, Eurydice doesn’t die from a snake bite but transforms itself with it.
Through a combination of myth and sci-fi tropes, it combines storytelling, video and sculpture to think about shapeshifting, queerness, and slimy things.
Performance and installation view
8mins
Performed by Constanza Castagnet
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An absence, twice removed
An absence, twice removed is a speculative fiction story constructed both through sculptures and text. It is a modification of the story of Echidna, a monster in Greek mythology considered to be the mother of monsters. It starts from the premise: what if the mother of monsters was in a queer relationship and had a fight? What if it bred all of these monsters to keep this relationship alive?
It talks about queer futurity and an extended idea of the trace and queer ephemera as essential to queer survival and reproduction.
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