Candida Alvarez

Candida Alvarez is a Chicago-based artist. She received a B.F.A. from Fordham University, Lincoln Center (1977) and a M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art (1997). Alvarez has exhibited nationally the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago; El Museo del Barrio, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY ; The Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO; The Queens Museum; The New Britain Museum of American Art, NY; The Bronx Museum, NY; PS 1, Long Island City; The June Kelly Gallery, NY; Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco; Gladstone Gallery, NY; Exit Art, NY among others. Alvarez has received grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation; The New York Foundation for the Arts; and most recently The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. Alvarez’s work is in the collections of The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; DePaul Art Museum, Addison Gallery of American Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is represented by Gavlak, LA/Palm Beach; and Monique Meloche, Chicago.

I use personal knowledge to build magical dimensions. My work is more about what holds it together than what is ultimately looks like. Drawing, collage, photography and painting play important roles in how I organize my work formally, although I am motivated by a process that I describe as an “active search” in which I incorporate material from my immediate world and everyday experience and then arrange it in a way that is organic and surprising to me. This “search” allows me to construct paintings that are composed of multiple individual elements that are then dismantled in the resulting fictional space of the work. Patterns on the floor, memories of my childhood, and photographs that are significant to me all function as ways and means of bringing my world, as well as what’s in front of me, directly into my work. I arrive at my paintings by manipulating the space between -- for example, positive and negative, and/or abstraction and representation. It is in this ‘in-between space’ that I dismantle truths to assemble fictions. These fictions are a function of the painting process. As an artist whose primary mediums are painting and drawing, I am driven to mine my experience to discover a container for visual form.
Forty years ago, the experience of witnessing light stream from a stained-glass window was critical to my current interpretation of abstraction. Strong graphic curves of lead hold countless numbers of facets that frame a larger narrative, a story that was mysteriously obliterated as colored light rays projected forward to create an ephemeral fleeting space that appeared back- lit like a computer screen. Pathways such as this that move from certainty to mystery have always intrigued me. I take on the power of transmitted light to alter perceptions of a magical and powerful new arrangement of form and color in the living world. My work stumbles through what I think of as chatty abstractions that shape-shift and dream-catch both light and space. These investigations allow for my paintings and drawings to build abstract narrative structures that mix and remix themselves, interweaving the narrative with the pictorial. My aim is to expand the hybrid space of painting while maintaining a crucial connection to daily life.