Candida Alvarez: Multihyphenate by Monique Meloche Gallery

Candida Alvarez

Multihyphenate 1

Front and back cover: Clear, 2023 (detail) 4

Candida Alvarez Multihyphenate

Monique Meloche Gallery

November 18 - January 6, 2024

Introduction by Alyssa Brubaker Essay by Rebecca Walker Designed by Chandler Arthur Edited by Staci Boris Photographed by Robert Chase Heishman

This catalogue was published on the occasion of Candida Alvarez’s second solo exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

Table of Contents Introduction

Essay

Installation Views

Artworks

Biographies

Exhibition Checklist

Introduction by Alyssa Brubaker

moniquemeloche is pleased to present Multihyphenate, a solo exhibition by Candida Alvarez and the artist’s second show with the gallery. The exhibition presents a series of new large-scale paintings on linen, intimate paintings on dinner napkins, and framed drawings. Alvarez’s complex and colorful works delicately balance abstraction and representation, interweaving the artist’s daily observations with material life. Multihyphenate represents a mashup of how experiences are accumulated and what stays with us, visualizing our evolving histories and the shapes that come from the world. The exhibition’s origin begins with Alvarez’s mother, who has been living in the US since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. In a long-standing practice of capturing the world around her, Alvarez takes photos of anything interesting that catches her eye. Among her large inventory of inspiration are printed iPhone photos of her mother sitting: at a restaurant (a particular pose caught her eye), in her home (the sunlight hitting her cheek), at the doctor (the way she dressed that day), etc., which span her studio walls. Sitting, a gesture that the artist’s 93-year-old mother frequently performs, lingers with Alvarez as she recalls Raphael’s The Madonna of the Chair, one of the first paintings she remembers seeing as a child, a coveted reproduction on her mother’s well-worn bible. Watching her mother through a photo lens, the shape of the relationship builds into a formal image and the photos become reassembled into paintings; Alvarez’s mother embodied. Sitting allows one to linger, which the artist finds comfort in, granting space to discover something mysteriously wonderful. The studio hosts a blooming orchid plant, an avocado tree, and beyond that, the tranquil rural Michigan landscape on which the artist’s studio sits, eliciting memories of the vista from her late father’s workshop in Puerto Rico. This new body of work was birthed in the studio and continued through two residencies at the LUMA Foundation in Arles, France in April and at Skowhegan in Maine this summer, marking Alvarez’s return as a mentor 42 years after her

first residency there. Together, these bits and pieces become the compositional building blocks for her paintings and drawings, hybrid spaces ripe with color and pattern. Amongst a series of distinct large kaleidoscopic paintings, ten small works on Yupo paper hold space for drawing. Titled Sunny, the works capture the artist’s time in the south of France. For Alvarez, drawing is essential, it is every day, it is the first thing you learn as a child, and it always informs her paintings. Drawing is the artist’s starting point–direct, gestural, primal, mark making. It affords the freedom to use line as a beginning point, from which color interjects. Drawing concretizes and then slips away as color fills the atmosphere, a call and response shaped by intuition. Accumulations of moves turn into visual material, a language of shapes and colors. Shape is metamorphosized from light, sound, a plant, a body, a sculpture, a mother, a daughter, Raphael’s Madonna, orchids, the French countryside; it’s all those things and not just one thing which become her work. It’s the multihyphenate personality of the painter and the drawer which gives permission for these collisions to happen in a way the artist can control. Multihyphenate showcases Alvarez’s methodology, always flexible, imaginative, and fueled by an unrelenting curiosity with the world around her. It’s the living part, the love part, the trusting part, the multiples that accumulate together to shape the way we see the world. Moreover, it’s simply allowing painting to speak on its own terms, away from the hierarchy of what painting should be about, it’s the possibility to create portraiture through abstraction. For Alvarez, it’s living palimpsest.

13 13

Essay

Breaking the Rules A Conversation with Candida Alvarez By Rebecca Walker I have known Candida Alvarez since the beginning of time, but we can also measure our relationship in decades: for thirty years I have stood with her as witness and comrade, student and teacher, champion and confidante. Our last published conversation took place in Candida’s studio in New Haven, in the early nineties when were both in search of space and time to do our creative work. Candida was married to Dawoud Bey at the time, and I marveled at their partnership: the soulful, contemplative painter with the formidable, quick-moving photographer. Their son Ramon was always somewhere, too; at her feet, in her arms, abiding in the air that enveloped them both. Husband and son were present in the studio that day, that is to say, Candida carried them both within her solitude. But there was also a singularity, a spaciousness, a claiming of territory. Candida was tender but resolute, determined to clarify her voice and use it, subordinate to no person or idea, place or time. I remember most of all her eyes on that day, hungry and alive. I remember thinking: this artist will not be stopped. This force will not be tamed. Today I stand in amazement before her vibrant and compelling body of work, recalling the certainty with which I knew that Candida Alvarez would be free. Loyal to the many, uninterested in the one, Multihyphenate is a seductive and mesmerizing confirmation of this undeniable truth. We spoke just after the show had been hung. Candida whirled about, taking me from painting to painting, talking fast about color and place, time and weather. Talking about her mother and fresco paintings, about dinner napkins and residencies in Arles and Skowhegan. We talked about being and doing it all. About finally seeing the work in one place, and discovering it anew. It’s been a long time since our first conversation about art and process, but here we are again, artist to artist, mother to mother, traveler to traveler. I’m excited to hear about this body of work. Tell me the origin story of Multihyphenate. Candida Alvarez: Well, for the last year, I’ve been working with a single subject: my mother. I was always seeing her in photographs, and because I wasn’t living with her, she would be photographed sitting down. I have all these pictures of my mother sitting in a chair. I was also thinking about Raphael’s painting Madonna of the Chair. We grew up Catholic and went to church every Sunday. That painting was the circular

16 16

Candida’s studio in Baroda, MI. Photo by Sarah Ayers

image on my mother’s old bible, and it was in a circular frame in the rectory at church. The painting is called Madonna of the Chair but when you look closely, the chair is there, it’s in the dark area and you can see it, but he’s not really focused on the chair, so it’s just a big question: Why was the chair so important? Was the chair being watched over? What’s really going on here? So my mother was the catalyst for the work, and then the painting provided a conceptual transition. That’s the food, and then the work has its own life. It’s all an excuse to paint, but it’s also a wonderful way to think about somebody you care about. Rebecca Walker: When you told me you were thinking about the Raphael, and also Merce Cunningham, and Martha Graham’s relationship to sitting and performance, I immediately imagined you in a chair in your studio, looking at the paintings and then out the window, at the paint and then the canvas.

17 17

In my mind’s eye you assumed different postures of action and repose, discernment and reflection. I started to think about the performative aspect of painting, with the chair as prop and anchor; a place of both vulnerability and authority. Looking at the paintings now, particularly the larger ones, I sense the experience of being seated and in motion at the same time, a kind of tumbling while still upright, grounded but also flying. CA: Well, that’s me, the artist. That’s me in the studio. I move around. I have little stools all around, I stand on them. I have a mechanics chair. I walk and sit down and get up. Maybe I am moving in circles in the studio, too, but in terms of the motion: a painting has to keep you in it, it has to trap your little eyeball. When the composition is good, your eye moves through space, Candida’s studio. Partly Cloudy in progress. Photo by Sarah Ayers following the clues. In these paintings, I’m creating a circular movement for the viewer that is also an invitation to read the work in a circular way, back to the Raphael. I start with a color, usually one color, and that opens it up. I don’t know what color it’s going to be until I start, and then everything grows from there. In one painting you can see a little caterpillar, or a drip, or a place where I left the linen of the canvas exposed. Another painting has a little fairy, a little shape that was there at the beginning in pencil and now it’s glittery and soft and feels like it could almost fly away. It’s very subtle, you have to look, but then you will see the relationships between everything. You start at one point and then you move to the next and the next and the next, and eventually you have these circular shapes coming toward you. The eye is moving, you are moving, the world is moving. This is the first time I’ve done anything like this, usually my work is very linear, easy to read. And now I think, oh my God, how do I feel about this? I am breaking away from the rules of training. I’m being a bad girl right now, it’s like letting my hair grow gray. But I am also giving myself the space to break away from the academy for a minute. To say this is me right now. This is who I am.

18 18

RW: I see that in the complexity of both the composition and the surface of these paintings. You are interrupting the idea of a single, linear story, where everything has a beginning, middle and end. Here there is spontaneity, multiplicity, a different approach to time. You disrupt the idea of a uniform level of finish, indeed the idea of being finished at all. This circularity, the spiral of past, present, future, of placing the eye/self within the circle/cycle, becomes a part of your vocabulary, a visual language that represents and transmits your way of both living in the world and reflecting upon it. CA: Yes. I’m thinking about this idea of what matters, what’s more important; I’m rethinking the hierarchy and material of the medium. Painting isn’t the only big thing. It’s also drawing and printmaking, and I’m bridging the three processes together to create something that holds together as painting. The work lives because it is comprised of multiple parts, it’s multihyphenate. There is no high and low, and I need them all because I want them all. RW: So multihyphenate instead of postmodern. A kind of evolution. CA: Yes. Because it’s more related to the human body, to living in a real world as opposed to a very specialized one. I need to be in the world. I need to be in a good place to be able to do all these things. To take pictures, to travel, to meet loved ones. You have to take time out of your life to discover the things that are waiting for you, to remember the things you forgot to remember. That to me is the magic of painting. It’s not just what you see, but what you discover, and how you compose or shape your life by the way you then come to see the world. For me it’s about finding a way of seeing that is not like a photograph, but more like a series of marks that live in different contexts. Like you hold a flower in your hand, but then at some point you forget it’s a flower, and you start walking towards other thoughts and other memories. You just start going someplace. It’s kind of another dimension, but it’s still very physical. Physical, and also joyful. RW: That’s interesting because the first thing I wrote when you sent photos of the work was “I want to live in those paintings!” I immediately felt what I think you’re saying: that when you look out at the world and let go of the lines around everything, what you see is an open field of color and shape, accompanied by various feelings and sensations. Seeing this way releases us from the literal world into a vast and enveloping field in which we feel less alone, as if the idea of a solitary self is perhaps not even particularly relevant. I feel that in these paintings, but the paintings also feel very personal, as if you’re taking us on a journey through your life and sharing your impressions of people and places, real and recreated. It feels very resolved, as if you’ve revisited these places that needed to be memorialized and then released, and both things are happening in the work. When I say I want to live in the paintings, it’s like I am saying that I want to visit you. To have a good, long sit with a dear friend,

Candida’s studio in Baroda, MI. Photo by Sarah Ayers

which you are. And then to listen to your story as it goes round and round, and I tumble through your universe. CA: Yes, yes. I love that. I think what you’re saying about the lines is exactly right. Because this idea that people have, that we can represent the body, for example, using lines doesn’t feel true to me because we hold something within those lines. We hold people we love, and we hold things we love. We hold books, clothes, shoes, babies, pencils. We hold mama’s hands. When I paint, I have to let go of the lines to create an atmosphere that resonates or reverberates with all that is potentially inside of them. It’s really an adventure, and the love really happens when you’re almost at the finish line. You’ve put your trust in something intangible, you have been wrestling with all these shapes that somehow bring the past back to life, and then slowly the paintings begin to feel like living entities, like they’re alive and can live without me, outside of me. They become almost like celebrities. They speak this idea that you are this thing, but you also come from all of these things, you are all of these things. And so really the painting has had a long life, which gives it a kind of wisdom. I am interested in what happens when we give ourselves permission to open up this idea of destination. I want to re-identify the destination as a journey that is ongoing; that is really the rest of my life.

20 20

Installation Views 23

Artworks 35

Sunny, 2023 Flashe paint and pencil on yupo paper 10 framed works, 12 x 9 in each 30.48 x 22.86 cm

Detail 37

Skowhegan #1, 2023 Flashe paint on cotton 19 x 19 in 48.3 x 48.3 cm

Detail 43

Mostly Clear, 2023 Acrylic, paint pen, glitter on linen 84 x 72 in 213.4 x 182.9 cm

Detail 45

Skowhegan #4, 2023 Flashe paint on cotton 19 x 19 in 48.3 x 48.3 cm

Detail 47

Skowhegan #3, 2023 Flashe paint on cotton 19 x 19 in 48.3 x 48.3 cm

Detail 49

Partly Cloudy, 2023 Acrylic, paint pen, glitter on linen 84 x 72 in 213.4 x 182.9 cm

Detail

Detail 53

Clear, 2023 Flashe paint, paint pen on linen 84 x 72 in 213.4 x 182.9 cm

Detail

Detail 57

Mostly Cloudy, 2023 Acrylic, paint pen, pencil, gold mica flakes on linen 84 x 72 in 213.4 x 182.9 cm

Detail 59

Detail

Skowhegan #2, 2023 Flashe paint on cotton 19 x 19 in 48.3 x 48.3 cm

Detail

Skowhegan #7, 2023 Flashe paint and pencil on yupo paper 12 x 9 in 30.5 x 22.9 cm

Detail

Skowhegan #11, 2023 Watercolor and pencil on yupo paper 12 x 9 in 30.5 x 22.9 cm

Detail

Biographies 69

Candida Alvarez is an artist whose primary materials are painting and drawing. Her abstractions are composed from a personal narrative that is captured through iPhone photography. Beginning with a collage-like exchange, Alvarez creates a pictorial space that eventually unfolds into drawings, resulting in several layers overlapping. The works evolve through an intuitive process where color becomes the pictorial architect between shape and line. Abstraction becomes a sense of wonder that tracks the formal play and lives within Alvarez’s compositions. Alvarez (b.1955, Brooklyn, NY) received her MFA from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (1997) and taught painting at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago for 25 years where she is now Professor Emeriti. Solo exhibitions include moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2020); Gavlak, Palm Beach, FL (2019); Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL (2017); Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL (2012); New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT (1996); and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (1992). Notable group exhibitions include Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2022-2023), and ICA Boston (2023); no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2022); To Weave the Sky: Textile Abstractions from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, El Espacio23, Miami, FL (2023-2024); The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles (2023-2024); Galerie Lelong, New York, NY (2023); School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2022); Z33 Gallery, Belgium (2021-2022); El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY (2021); DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL (2018); Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO (2017); and The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (1990). Public collections include the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Peréz Art Museum Miami, FL; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, El Museo de Barrio, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Seattle Art Museum, WA; and DePaul Art Museum, IL. Recent awards and fellowships include the 2022 Ford Mellon Foundation Latinx Artist Fellowship, 2022 Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art, the Helen Frankenthaler Award for painting in 2021, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2019. In 2023, Alvarez was artist in residence at the LUMA Foundation Arles, France and at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, ME. She currently lives and works in Baroda, MI and Chicago, IL.

Rebecca Walker is a writer and producer who has contributed to the global conversation about identity, power, and the evolution of the human family for over three decades. Her articles are numerous, her ten books include Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, Adé: A Love Story, and Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo, and her writing about visual art includes essays on the work of Kehinde Wiley, Kara Walker, Dawoud Bey, Beverly Buchanan, Ana Mendieta, and others. Rebecca has engaged audiences at over four hundred universities, literary conferences, and art museums around the world, including Yale, Spelman, Brown, the Whitney Museum, the Walker Arts Center, Fondazione Merz, the Museum of the African Diaspora, and the Ministries of Arts and Culture in Sweden, Estonia, and Bulgaria. She has won many awards, and was named by Time Magazine as one of the most influential leaders of her generation.

Exhibition Checklist Sunny, 2023 Flashe paint and pencil on yupo paper 10 framed works, 12 x 9 in each 30.48 x 22.86 cm

Clear, 2023 Flashe paint, paint pen on linen 84 x 72 in 213.4 x 182.9 cm

Skowhegan #1, 2023 Flashe paint on cotton 19 x 19 in 48.3 x 48. 3 cm

Mostly Cloudy, 2023 Acrylic, paint pen, pencil, gold mica flakes on linen 84 x 72 in 213.4 x 182.9 cm

Mostly Clear, 2023 Acrylic, paint pen, glitter on linen 84 x 72 in 213.4 x 182.9 cm Skowhegan #4, 2023 Flashe paint on cotton 19 x 19 in 48.3 x 48. 3 cm Skowhegan #3, 2023 Flashe paint on cotton 19 x 19 in 48.3 x 48. 3 cm Partly Cloudy, 2023 Acrylic, paint pen, glitter on linen 84 x 72 in 213.4 x 182.9 cm

Skowhegan #2, 2023 Flashe paint on cotton 19 x 19 in 48.3 x 48. 3 cm Skowhegan #7, 2023 Flashe paint and pencil on yupo paper 12 x 9 in 30.5 x 22.9 cm Skowhegan #11, 2023 Watercolor and pencil on yupo paper 12 x 9 in 30.5 x 22.9 cm

Monique Meloche Gallery is located at 451 N Paulina Street, Chicago, IL 60622 For additional info, visit moniquemeloche.com or email info@moniquemeloche.com