I have known the work of Claudia Perez-Pavon for about ten years. I was introduced to it by the late artist, critic and art-promoter Adolfo Patiño, who played a critical role in the renewal of creative energies and artistic movements in Mexico City from the late seventies to the early nineties. At the time, Perez-Pavon was exploring ‘portraiture’, in what superficially could have seemed a rather traditional mode. On closer attention, though,

it became apparent to me that her small paintings of (naked) men, of all ages, lying casually in quasi-domestic settings, were not ordinary portraits. They could remind one of the starkness and daring of a Lucian Freud, but also had something else: a sense of empathy with – or non-detachment – from their subjects, as if the painter were using her models as a mirror of her own interiority. This was all the more intriguing because of the

cross-gender tension which they also conveyed.

I came across the work of Perez-Pavon, again, when she won the prestigious Premio Tamayo (ex aequo with Daniel Lezama, another extremeley gifted Mexican painter of her generation). By that time, Perez-Pavon had fully hit her stride, finding the form and format that has characterized her paintings over the past half-decade: These are polyptycs in which a ‘theme’ is pictorially explored through often ‘poignant’ close-ups, in a sort of non-sequential caleidoscope of fragments and details invested with expressive significance.

A story is sometimes implied, around them, but once more what seems to interest the artist is to find ways — unique and specific as well as ‘universal’ — of getting truly close to her subjects, as if in a sort of hand-to-hand artistic combat, as much with them as with the very act of painting them.

There is a hidden (though perhaps not so hidden) performative dimension to Perez-Pavon’s paintings which is almost in contrast with their representational intensity – the painfully and painstakingly slow pictorial practice from which they emerge. And yet, in an equally telling paradox, the artist is obviously at all times cognizant of the flood of ready-made and re-produced images by which we are constantly inundated, and has found ways of incorporating these, or photographic documentation of her own, in her painterly medium, so that at times, in moving from one polyptyc element to the next, we lose the sense of where we are, as viewers, and are like drawn into a flowing, alien, and somewhat vertiginous inner world.

Perez-Pavon’s polyptycs are eminently about movement, and they move from a stark confrontation with the

objective world of things and images, but in the end they are about an eminently intimate, almost secret, mode of experience.

Francesco pellizzi