ARCA PAINTS

Huw: Your first exhibition of paintings, “Angels”, is up at Cordova here in Barcelona. How long have you been working on them?
Alejandra: The paintings have lived with me for many years now, since before lockdown. I made the decision that I wasn’t going to buy new canvases, but rather work with a set number of canvases and change those images until they reached their ultimate forms. That was my way of having the confidence and humility to enter the fray of contemporary art and painting with both ambition and respect for the medium.
So you set yourself a limit at the start and then worked within that limit reusing the same canvases again and again?
Exactly. Working within pop, there’s a demand that you reconcile with as a songwriter – how familiar or comforting to make a sound. Pop music is meant for connecting with lots of people in a way that painting necessarily doesn’t allow for or even ask for.
I see that.
There’s this difference between fierce experimentation and indulgence, and wanting to help others, be useful to others, to serve others through art. In my life, music builds a bridge to people, so to speak, and makes it possible to deconstruct things by using the archetypal within pop. This is as opposed to painting that had no bearing whatsoever on productivity for me. I started painting at the moment when I was doubting whether I wanted to keep making music. Having these paintings in their final forms as you see them now…these are the images that allowed me to fall back in love with making art.
Wow.
It’s a paradox, but not really. It does make sense. In the tarot, the maximum level of growth is followed by death and then rebirth at the most primordial and basic levels. If you’re growing, that’s what happens. The problem is when you get stuck or calcified in any given medium or number of the card in the tarot, which is to say – every card can become a trap if you don’t move to the next phase.

So your painting is a way out, an escape route from a crisis within your pop music?
No, the crisis would be to not question what I am doing. Once you’ve mastered something, you need to be a fool – an innocent – in another medium in order to find, again, your enthusiasm.
But you don’t keep mediums separate, in my opinion. It’s clear in your live performances that they are a gesamtkunstwerk.
When you think about gesamtkunstwerk, it’s a concept of an all-inclusive artwork that incorporates as many mediums as possible. It’s a very modernist idea and I do strive towards that in the performances, but painting is something far more rudimentary, primordial and primal. I don’t have to be on a computer to make paintings. I can actually grab a knife and stab the canvas or spray paint to get dirty with it.
As you did!
There’s a very clinical element to making music on computers. I was so tired of that estrangement. You know the “digital audio workstation”? That’s what they call software that makes music. Even if the DAW becomes like an extra limb, you’re still beholden to the technology. To go back to a pre-linguistic level of experimentation, play and exploring while making these paintings reminded me of the reasons why I spoke out and showed my art to begin with.
Talking about your physical relationship with the paintings, each one bears the marks of its own making…layers and layers of expressive brush strokes and spray paint. These violent rips and tears. My favorites are those where it feels like the canvas has been pulled apart and then remade and pulled apart again.
Gracias.
The paintings themselves seem to me to be a lot about your body’s gestures and how they relate to canvas. Do you see them as an extension of your performances as a musician?
I feel a bit like Jackson Pollock, in that I want to have the stain on the canvas look like there’s a velocity, a speed of the paint. Almost like a gory gash of blood, if you will. Evoking and invoking violence – that’s what charges them up. When I think about Jackson Pollock, I think about how he wants things to be energetic without him objectivizing himself. If anything, it’s making the viewer of the painting think, ‘I can relate to that. It’s close enough for me to feel access to that rage’. That’s the hope, you know? I’m not trying to center myself or my body as part of the paintings.
Right.
I want people to feel like everything that they can’t scream, they feel those screams in the canvas.

Were you full of rage while painting most of these angels?
See, I need to be given space to work from a place of calm creativity in order to go psycho. To enter those trance-like states where my eyes go white, roll back into the head and I’m just in a feverish kind of intensity. My breathing goes different, my body is different and then I make, I work. These paintings all emerge from those states.
It also seems to me, listening to what you said about producing music versus painting, that the paintings themselves are this analogue response to the tyranny of the digital and the electronic over your life.
The tyranny of the screen.
Yes. On a practical level, things like Photoshop and Instagram and TikTok. But do you also think about this tyranny on a conceptual level? Like where the “digital” becomes a technology of fear – a fear of contagion, a fear of strangers and of bodily fluid and broken skin and penetrated bodies.
It’s at the core of every alien invasion movie. And I think this concept also works through different imperialist and settler colonialist violences. Because – if you think about the foreign, the pathogen – anything that’s outside the body is contamination. Anything that’s inside the body is not. If you’re really that afraid of the other in a microscopic sense, you develop this attitude of fear.
Do you feel this fear in your own life?
I reject it. Like when I’m at the nightclub, you know, kissing everyone behind the deejay booth that wants to kiss me. And someone burns my arm with a cigarette and it’s a forever scar. And a smoke machine is leaking droplets of sweat, oozing into my open wounds. When I feel that sweaty, disgusting queerness in every pore, when I can taste everyone’s sweat, when I can feel that bodily fluid penetrate me, that’s when I feel most free. And that’s something that people with that fear will never know. That’s the saddest part.
It’s like trying to explain a dark room to someone and then they’re disgusted by it and you realize that the thing that they’re disgusted by – the bodily intensity and unknown of it – is the exact thing that attracts you.
It’s more primordial than that. It’s not that you have a kick for something that people find to be an aberration, the problem is that many people divorce themselves from their animality to the point where they can’t feel the spirituality. That’s the sacredness of a dark room. But I think this digitized fear is, like you said, a kind of the disease of our current society.
There’s this amazing book by Klaus Theweleit called ‘Male Fantasies’ about how, after the First World War, all these German soldiers who had been serving in the trenches – who’d seen their friends literally drowning in mud and all the blood and gore – came back and became terrified of bodily fluids. The anti-communism and fear of the Russians in all these novels, produced by guys who became fascists, is about “leaking”. Their fear is of “red floods”, the hoards coming over. And the response is that the nation is a body and it needs to be made stronger and reinforced, so the skin doesn’t break.
Wow.
And that’s exactly what you see happening in Gaza. They talk about Palestinians as if they’re a disease within the body of the Israeli borders. And they’ve tried to surround it with white blood cells but now the only way to get rid of the disease is to push it outside the body.
What they don’t understand about trauma, intergenerational trauma, is that you can’t make something go away by trying to kill it off culturally. It’s only going to elicit and evoke vengeance and animosity. That will be the collapse, I think, of their hubris. I pray for that.
Right.
I can even see parallels between the way that the system is policing algorithmic representations of Palestinian lives – and how little value they’re given – with how much the system says trans life is worth compared to others in our society. This is not a coincidence. It’s those that are considered to be less valuable whose suffering goes unnoticed. But, if you think about it, you can’t really cover the sun with a finger. It’s not going to go away.
It’s awful.
I can’t stand for it. I can’t stand for it. From the outside, people siding with the system are like, ‘What about 7 October?’ Just listen to how the news talks about an Israeli life or a Ukrainian life versus a Palestinian life. Pay attention to how the headlines are phrased. That’s all you need to know. I shouldn’t need to persuade anyone to rekindle the compassion in their hearts in the face of human suffering.
Yes. This attitude – to make others less than human – is like a logic of genocide, but it’s everywhere. There’s another thing I really wanted to ask you about. A lot of your art, your performances and especially your collaborations with Carlos Sáez, deal with the concept of mutancy and prosthesis.
Yes.
One thing that’s sort of counterintuitive about prosthesis is that it actually accentuates and highlights the flesh, like the fleshy realness of what can and does go wrong with bodies or what is non-normative in bodies.
Totally.

In declaring yourself a “mutant” you, in some ways, are highlighting all that’s fucked up about normalcy. Normalcy is so much more fucked up than mutancy, the idea that there IS normalcy.
Thinking that there’s a normal or a default makes me flinch. Even when they ask me if I want regular milk. The idea of a default or a standard or a preset is offensive enough to me that when someone asks me if I want “normal milk” then I answer “cow milk”. I want nuance, I want specificity.
One-hundred percent.
There’s actually two things that were the crux and the center of my transitioning, what I hoped to find. The first one was suavidad. “Softness” is the closest word. That’s the main thing I was seeking. And the second one was that I wanted to do away with being given a script. I’d gotten so good at playing masculinity. I’m a really good drag king.
Oh my. (laughs)
I can still put it on like… (deep voice) Si tu supiera la autoridad que puedo yo transmitir de la forma mas masculina… I literally code switch because I will do away with the bullshit manipulation of being given a script just because I know how to play it. I’m not interested. I want to write my own. And I also didn’t want my transition to be, like, ‘Okay, do away with male as script and adopt female as script.’ Because I am a tomboy. I’m a doll, I’m a girl’s girl in certain ways, but I also like androgyny. I don’t have a problem with the liminal. In fact, I think it’s a sign of intelligence to be able to superpose two seemingly disparate abstract concepts and to see within the overlap of space. I think that’s a sign of intelligence.
Yeah. That’s what’s often the most interesting or attractive or sexy, right?
If you’re kinky.
Maybe that’s my problem.
That’s not a problem. It’s an opportunity.

I’m really interested by the response that your fans have to you in that way because you seem to fulfill two roles, one is the “mutant” and the other is the “mother”. For young queer people, what does it mean that they choose someone to be both mutant and mother at the same time?
I suffer every day to honor that because if you’re queer, you often don’t have access to a mother’s love in the same way. Well, it depends on your upbringing and your relationship to the maternal archetype. But I think there’s different ways of being a mother. The most important thing is a sense of unconditional love. That’s what I try to offer the mutants in return for their devotion, which I so appreciate.
Do you take inspiration for this mutant/mother role from anywhere?
Well, it’s very ballroom too, that’s really where it comes from. I think of house mothers or drag mothers. It’s tied to a particular place in time in history. It’s New York City. It’s a lineage all the way back to Stonewall and before that, right? It’s a lineage tied to that environment by the piers. You had to cross the West Side Highway. It was a place that wasn’t designed to be accessible. A threshold, the migrant border. A place where cruising and queerness was made possible.
One thing that I noticed that also perhaps explains the depth of the love that you share with your fans is that you are very much “for real”.
You know, I try. I want to die trying. I’d rather unplug my circuitry than ruin everything I’ve stood for. I didn’t come this far just to come this far and I remember that every step of the way.
But, like, you sometimes have irony in your work, but it’s–
It’s more anger. I’m not ironic, I’m just angry!
Okay.
So angry.
Okay.
I want to set things on fire!
(laughs) Well, that’s what I like – it doesn’t distance you from being real. You mean it. Everything that you do, you mean it.
At the end of the day, these are all invitations to ideas. I don’t WANT to bludgeon anyone over the head with my beliefs. I don’t WANT to convert anyone into any form of seeing things.
What are you inviting people to think about with the angels?
I do want these paintings to be understood as political gestures. When I walk into the show and I think about the theme “angels”, I see them as totems or beacons. Some of them have faces on them, eyes and a mouth. These light up our cognitive function, you know, our cerebral cortex recognizes faces and eyes and lips a lot. There’s also an almost unassumingly naive, cartoonish quality to them. But then again, there’s a profound, almost perverse darkness. And that juxtaposition between that light and that shadow is part of what made me feel it was possible to use such a sacred word, “angels”, to refer to them.
Bless.
When I think about mutants, I see a directness, a correlation between mutancy and “angelness”. I think about these angels like Mother Teresa or Gandhi. Compassionate and Christlike. They slap you out of pain, out of humiliation, you forgive. I think queer people, we do this every day. So for me, when I think about “angelness”, I think about mutancy and I think about queerness all in one.
Well, this is a real crime of the Renaissance. Traditionally, descriptions of angels were horrifying. For an angel to visit you was terrifying because they were mutants.
Like in your book, ‘Unknown Language’, right? Angels are a gaggle of wings, feathers and eyes. Well, so then let them fear us as such.
And then, at some point later in art history, they turned into babies with wings. Your angels, Alejandra, are biblically accurate angels.
Let them fear our purity! Let them fear our innocence that we protected! Fine! Let them fear that, if they must. See, angels and mutants are literally, for me, the same thing. I don’t want to disempower my community. I want us to feel as powerful as we need to be to stand for ourselves, to stand for our voices, to let our voices be heard, to come together. I think that’s as angelic as can be in every sense of the word, both the sweet and the ferocious.
That seems like a good place to stop.
Period.
Thank you so much.
I love this interview.