Ana Laura Aláez is not Ana Laura Aláez. Ana Laura Aláez is a set of experiences, a series of experiences, a hatajo of doubts. Ana Laura Aláez (Bilbao, 55 years old) is a concatenation of letters that remain fixed while everything changes around you-it changes the look, changes the context, even changing the skin. Only the art remains, which is also transformed. “The society is determined to give you a reading objective, but the interesting thing about it is that it allows us to ask questions”, posed by the creator, sitting on a couch next to a window in the Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo (CA2M), in Móstoles, beginning Friday presents the exhibition All the concerts, all the nights, all-empty (up to January 26, 2024, the year that comes in Azkuna Zentroa of Bilbao), a selection of pieces ancient and modern, while proposing a partial revision of his work, presents dialogues unpublished, and relationships never before established between their sculptures, installations or videos.
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“it Is redescribir my plastic works”, abounds. Considered as one of the great exponents of contemporary art in Spain, and also delves into the wound of the issues of life. It comes from thinking with the hands and with the view on “love and death”, issues that, he says, define the future of the world. The appointment represents the return of a creator who, between reflections on the new languages of sculpture, pop culture references and forays into the dance floor as a place of hedonistic and also political, played an essential role in the Spanish art scene of the turn of the century.
‘little asshole 1996-2008’, Ana Laura Aláez.
Ana Laura Aláez is a creature that hatches in the evening. There, in the midst of the darkness, within the club, in the houses in darkness, open spaces “elusive, devoid of coordinates, where there is a desire that beats in an obvious way”, illustrates. That energy has on the engine of many of his works, from his photographs of cut-ies carried out in the nineties to pieces iconic as the installation Dance and Disco, the real disco installed in the year 2000 at the Reina Sofia Museum (the piece that generated, he says Aláez, “a huge amount of phobias and fili”, and that only now begins to be appreciated, because “art takes time”), or All the concerts, all night, all empty, the creation of 2009 which gives its poetic title to the exhibition (curated by critical Bea Espejo, contributor of THE COUNTRY), made from t-shirts of groups of music. Ideas such as the destruction and reconstruction personal, invisibility, violence, and vulnerability, the yearning for freedom, the language or the truth of travel, constant and changeable, all that corpus creative in the that, on numerous occasions, is the body of the artist, the material and the tool of communication.
“Each piece represents a time in your life, and there are some who would be unable to do now, but I do not regret,” he confesses. “However, I know that the use of the body creates a look-stigmatizing, because they tend to think that you do that exercise for the male gaze”.Ana Laura Aláez was born in 1964 in the Biscay of the blast furnaces, the youth without a future, the minds subjugated by machismo. “In the art, the presence of men was absolute.” Moved by an impulse that drove him to create, to explore, to seek his own departure, he spent a season in New York before returning to Spain. Around the new millennium met in Madrid at the musical duo Silvania, with whom he collaborated in the installation of the Reina Sofia and recorded an album of electronics that accompanied their videos, Girls On Film.
In 2008, one of the members of the group, Coco Ciëlo, was murdered in his home by two men with the that would maintain sexual relations. “He was a great friend to whom annihilated by a hate crime. It is something that has changed my life,” she recalls, still with a knot in the throat. After that episode, once more, returned to change everything, Aláez, who represented Spain in the 1999 Venice Biennale, he found refuge in a village of Mallorca, where he still lives with his partner, another musician who will take part in one of his future projects: “A mix of catalogue raisonné, personal journal, drawing, performance and sculpture in which the unifying element will be the music” and that will be done during a stay in Japan thanks to a scholarship.
Frame ‘Dance & Drive’, a video documentary of the installation.
“But my study is my head”, tells us about his creative process, a melting pot of approaches and disciplines, which is also where fashion plays a card final. “My first work of art was my outfit: I remember picking up the quilt from the grave of my mother, to dye it black and make myself a dress,” he recalls today, dressed again in black, with a skirt and knee-high boots.
life, in this transit permanent, sometimes returns to Ana Laura Aláez to the starting point. “It is assumed that a trajectory is linear and ascending, but I don’t think so,” he says. “Everything changes, but that is part of maturity, and I aspire to be like [the French artist] Louise Bourgeois: with a face full of wrinkles and eyes full of brightness”.
Sketch for a invisible woman
In 1992, during his stay in New York, Ana Laura Aláez gave way to one of their proposals to the most recognized sculpture on Women’s high heels platform. It is a series of six wigs placed on six pairs of shoes to the level where it should be placed at the head. Between the heads and the feet there’s nothing, only emptiness. This work condenses many of the concerns of the artist: reflections on the body, on the visibility of the woman, on the expression of identity through materiality. In the CA2M showcases now the Sketch on women’s high heels platform, a review of the same project carried out in 2019. Instead of moving forward, of growing, the work returns to its minimal expression: now there are only the wigs, the sketch of something a day it was and today it no longer exists.
