“For me, painting is a question about time,” says Circe Irasema. The artist, who lives and works in Mexico Metropolis, thinks deeply in regards to the dominance of the male gaze in Western artwork historical past and the way that authority influences the technical and materials qualities of the works themselves. Preserving a chunk made on this custom, her work acknowledges, essentially means preserving all that it represents.
As a distinction, the artist has turned to an unconventional feminized medium. Utilizing colourful eyeshadow truffles, powder blushes, and lengthy acrylic nails, Irasema creates “an alternative version of the history of painting. A history that tells intimate or hidden stories about the body, the feminine, the performative, metamorphosis, the fragility and transience of life, the domestic, the gaze, and beauty.”
Combining comestics and adornments with extra widespread supplies like gouache and acrylic paint, Irasema creates vibrant anatomical fashions and extra summary picket works embedded with eyeshadows. Showing as work from a distance, these mixed-media works meld a conventional artwork kind with a longstanding mode of self-expression and beautification.
Given the fragile nature of powder compacts—a actuality for anybody who’s dropped an eyeshadow palette and watched it shatter—the delicate materials requires a degree of care that turns into symbolic for the artist. “It stems from a popular understanding that relates to the everyday, distances itself from academia, and maintains a connection with sentimental education,” she provides. The place expression by excessive artwork has lengthy been privileged, make-up and vogue have traditionally been learn as shallow and even frivolous, a conception Irasema handily rejects.
Lots of the works proven listed here are a part of a collection titled Cosmic Portray, a nod to the shared etymological root of the phrases cosmetics and cosmos. Translating to “order,” “the word is understood as something harmonious and beautiful,” the artist provides. “This Greek meaning represents and is the basis of the canon of beauty that emerges from geometry, the cornerstone of painting since the Renaissance. This work attempts to use these same premises to reconfigure this pictorial notion with the compact powder of makeup.”
Irasema is presently making ready for a solo exhibition at Carrillo Gil Artwork Museum and creating works for Artwork Basel Miami. Comply with her apply on Instagram.
