Artist Feature: Pilar Alonso
...to create a debate on intimacy, masks and identity.
I had the pleasure of meeting and spending time with Pilar Alonso, while inhabiting the artist residency, Kaus Austalis, in Rotterdam, Netherlands in 2012. Pilar stayed and worked in the room below the writer’s studio that Matty Byloos and I shared during a cold, wet Spring. First connecting in the communial kitchen (where we spent most of our social time, cooking lasagne, rabbit, potato tortilla, casserole), when I finally got to see the paintings and drawings she was working on in her studio I was completely blown away. She is certainly one of my favorite working artists and I can’t stand behind the subject matter of her work enough.
From the artist [translated by Jeff Diteman]:
“The Cabinet of Cándida Standwick” is sort of a spinoff, moving on from the motifs of Alonso’s previous series, “La Diva,” an artistic-narrative project started during her residency in the Glogauair center in Berlin, featuring fragmented scenarios and characters with confused identity. The goal of “The Cabinet of Cándida Standwick” is to create a debate on intimacy, masks and identity.
At the center of this imaginary chiaroscuro world where nothing is what it seems, is the main character, Cándida Standwick, an artisan who crafts hairpieces, wigs and prostheses helping others to configure their identity. There are also other disturbing characters fleshing out the symbolic cyclogenesis created by Alonso: the sexual ambiguity of Toni Volouns, the broken innocence of Pepa Clark, and the therianthropic Frida Paluchi, half woman, half dog, tender when it’s convenient, and intermittently loyal.
“The Cabinet of Cándida Standwick” is a collection of large-scale drawings along with installations, giclée prints and paintings reflecting on deception, voyeurism and the conflict of multifaceted personalities in the interconnected world of the 21st Century. Metamorphosis, secrets, order, and chaos mixed together in the intimacy of a room where anyone can choose who they want to be.
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Pilar Alonso, born in Vigo, got her degree in Fine Arts from University of Sevilla. The recipient of a grant as the resident painter at the Paular School in Segovia, Spain, she did graduate studies at the Pedro Barrié de la Maza Foundation in the Städelschule of Frankfurt, Germany with Per Kirkeby. Over the course of her career, she has displayed her works in galleries and other spaces in Spain and Germany. She has developed film projects such as “Corpos son Creación” (Experimenta Danza), the Special 40th Anniversary Concert: Grant Winners’ Cycle, and Cristina Pato’s concert for the opening of the 5th EFC Summer Academy on Philanthropy. Her work is included in collections such as the Pedro Barrié de la Maza Foundation, the Nova Caixa Galicia Foundation and the Caja de Segovia. In 2012, she published her first artist’s book for the “La Diva” series.