Alona Harpaz (Tel Aviv, 1971) mixes beauty and horror, painting human figures coexisting with monkeys, wolves, fawns, and other wild animals, in a colorful explosion of botanical motifs. She applies pure colors in an exuberant way, with strong and vibrant gestures. The choice of color nods little to the natural world, but more to one's imagination, and this subjective palette generates emotion. In her paintings, the artist and the beast exist simultaneously, one next to the other, like Yadwigha in the 'Dream' and the wandering woman in the 'Sleeping Gypsy' by the customs officer Henri Rousseau. As the critic Elke Buhr writes, "beauty is joined not only by the terrible, but also by politics". In one of her paintings, Frequency Watchers, the artist paints herself on a motorcycle, alluding to the Riot Grrrl, and of course, the Bikini Kill band. According to Buhr, "punk, feminism and pink lipstick" coexist with Harpaz. She also reflects her family: her father was born in a Kibbutz and her Romanian mother was a ballet dancer.
Nicolás Laiz Placeres (Lanzarote, 1975) presents Nopalia, a new series in which the artist, a native of the Canary Islands - land of nopales, a plant stripped of all metaphysics, and the scene of the devastating industry of tourism - juxtaposes effigies of religious and wild reminiscence with very different elements, which we find in souvenir shops, and which contribute to the representative image of the Canary Islands: a conch, a callao, a tunera, a cactus and a plastic water bottle. In the society of overproduction, of excess, when everything, including the earth, is potentially a cult object, it is, in advance, a waste product. As Laiz Placeres says: "the relationship of the human being with Nature in the 21st century is presented as the chronicle of a catastrophe foretold". The artist proposes, in our time -when the solid and the sacred have ceased to be so-, a reencounter of the human with nature through his sculptures that function as magical forms that, potentially, with illusion, cure the current state of things.
