Make Up : The Varnished Truth

by Victor Stamp

 

Rocío Plúas’s Make Up consists of a series of pages torn from glossy magazines and then drawn and painted upon with mixed media in such a way that the “canvas” (the magazine background) appears in various degrees of visibility ranging from total opacity to total transparency, thereby creating a kind of palimpsest that offers the viewer a double and contradictory reading.

Whereas in traditional oil painting the underpainting prepared the ground for the overpainting, offering a tentative and schematic version of what would eventually hide it, here the foundation layer (to borrow an appropriately  cosmetic metaphor) is gently obliterated and countered by the fluid, sketchy washes that partially cover it. On the level of content, the immaculate and fictitiously wrinkle-free faces and bodies that form the standard fare of beauty and fashion publications are disrupted by portraits of women wearing expressions that fall somewhere between sullen and indifferent. On the formal level the immaculate gloss of photography gives way to the comparative “poverty” of the painted trace. The result is a kind of playful graffiti that takes the space of the mass media rather than the public, physical space as its target.

Each work in the series bears as its title a woman’s name. And if one of these names is John, the artist, inspired predominantly by her encounters with women in marginal social situations (immigrants, sex workers, etc.) explains that John is perhaps a transvestite or transexual and thereby begs inclusion in the feminine gamut. And yet the works are by no means militant in their intent or effect and offer ambiguous readings: in John (as in several of the works), the sketched face is set against a background of luxury consumer items that no doubt exert a powerful attraction upon the protagonist and indeed upon a majority of women, regardless of their social status. The fantasy world of the glossies may be challenged and negated by the often harsh realities of life but it cannot be totally ignored or obliterated.

This ambiguity also extends of course to the title of the series: the cosmetic products exhibited and advertised in the magazine pages are overlayed by another kind of makeup ― the paint of the artist’s brushstrokes. It is in the tension between these two layers that something like the truth emerges: a truth the artist is obliged to make up ...

women