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Alicia paz, L'Eloqunte, 2011, mixed media on paper
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Marisol Malatesta, Untitled, 2011, pencil on Victorian vinage paper
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Lizi Sanchez, White Pearl in Equilibrium, 2008, collage on paper
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Through the Looking Glass, Installation View ( Malatesta), 2012, oil on canvas
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Through the Looking Glass, Installation View ( Paz) 2012, mixed media on paper
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Doris A.Day, Untitled, 2012, acrylic,oil qnd pencil on canvas
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Doris A.Day, Yellow Mama, 2012, acrylic,oil and pencil on canvas
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Through The Looking Glass, Gallery 1
Marisol Malatesta, Alicia Paz, Lizi Sanchez

Doris A.Day, Gallery 2

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The Agency is pleased to present the group exhibition featuring Alicia Paz (Mexico), Marisol Malatesta (Peru) andLizi Sánchez (Peru). “Through the Looking Glass” seeks to re•evaluate the prevalence of the Surrealist canon withinLatin•American practice. In a ‘wunderkammer’•type setting the show examines the works’ cultural alienation andalignment as well as the female gaze. With all three artists currently working in Europe the re•contextualisation ofmodernist practice is crucial for contemporary practice. Beyond the European modern legacy, however, there isthe strong and established presence of surrealism in Latin•American art from the late Nineteen Forties and Fifties,with Roberto Matta Echaurren/ Matta, Wilfredo Lam and the Mexican women artists Remedios Varo, María
Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo. The works presented in ‘Through the Looking Glass’ oscillate between actual heritageand diasporic viewpoints of cultural iconography. The title of the show, with its reference to Lewis Carroll’s book,suggests the possibility of two simultaneous realities, with the alternate reality being just as accessible.

Alicia Paz’ most recent 3D collages on paper with their carnavalesque opulence and the ‘quotation‘ of Venetianmasquerade and Disney style Latin American stereotype both challenge the boundaries of ‘abject’ representationand by the same token flirt with fashionable exaggeration. They further refer to the heritage of the Mexicanfemale auto•portrait in the works of Izquierdo and Kahlo respectively, albeit from a post•consumerist perspective. The self•portrait’s authenticity has been replaced by the fashion photo cipher of the perfect face and yet isquestioned by the artist’s ‘automatic’ assemblage, which masks the masque.

Lizi Sanchez also utilises fashionmagazines as her basis material, a nod to the comforting ubiquity of a global fashion brand such as Vogue and works
them into formalist collages. The works point away from consumption and to a more internal world of intricateemotiveness and dreamlike states. Formalist rigour is replaced by associative play in the manner of a game of
‘Cadavre Exquis’ played solo.

Marisol Malatesta on the other hand relies on the manifestation of externallyauthenticated reality in current newspaper imagery, taking her cue from harsh interrogation photographs, documentsof war negotiation and atrocities. Her drawings present the alternate reality of a more visceral interpretation with the dunce and the iconography of inquisition rendering factual representations dreamlike but not remote, much in themanner that Alice is aware of one timeline and another yet is not able to exact a passage between both.

The exhibition ‘Through the Looking Glass ‘does not postulate a feminist or Latin American gaze but rather seeks to diffuse or obfuscate gaze itself,since a globally informed or a widely travelled gaze is a kaleidoscopic spread of many viewpoints.

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Doris A.Day, A Project of Anxiety  Gallery2

The Agency is pleased to present Londoner Doris A. Day (born 1982) with his second solo exhibition. After a successful debut show Day chose to withdraw into his studio to embark on a series of studies with the aim of capturing the spirit of Francis Bacon’s iconic “Screaming Pope”. Baconhimself described the ‘Pope’ as an incomplete work, one, for which he created studies throughout the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties. It was thisprocess, which led to Day experimenting almost performatively on finding an essence of the ‘Pope’, which would be authentic to him. The works do not aspire to copy or supercede, but to extract an essential gesture from the Bacon Studies, simply leading to a further set of studies. The emphasis for Day is not on completeness but on continuance, an almost obsessive and haunting process of retracing a motive mechanically and mentally until it separates from the original enough to be a thing unto itself and yet bears close resemblance. The balance between these two poles is one of discomfort and precariousness. Day sets himself up to be the tightrope walker, tackling an impossibly huge subject matter. But somehow he succeeds, since the discomfort of the incomplete canvas becomes the image in itself. Bacon’s studies for Pope Innocence X were his attempt to comeclose to the essence of Velázquez’ 1650 portrait. Bacon painted over 45 versions of Velázquez’ work, without looking at the original which influenceda large proportion of his oeuvre. For Bacon it was a new approach to a representational truth, which he in turn had taken on from Picasso’s re•working of works by Grunewald and Velázquez for example.


For Doris Day the re•iteration without the use of copies or projected images has become a Zen exercise of finding a truth in the constant re•enactment itself without the aim of arriving at the ultimate image. The five works presented are a selection of his continuing variations on thesubject. Installed as a coherent group on coloured walls they present a clear stylistic direction with a common departure point.