Mercedes Bazan
Colorful worlds full of thoughtful-looking figures. That’s the first thing you notice about Mercedes Bazan’s work, but it’s not the only thing. The second time through a piece, you start catching details—a building half-dissolved into pattern in the background, the exact angle of a face, the weight of a specific piece of fabric. The third time, you’re looking at something almost totally different from what you saw on the first pass.
I think what draws me in is that this isn’t work that’s trying to make a statement about femininity or women or any of that theoretical stuff. It’s just her language. Strong and beautiful and clever figures in universes where the rules bend just slightly different from ours. She’s based in Ireland, though the geography doesn’t really matter—these aren’t specific places, they’re alternatives. Private universes, the kind only color and composition and pure formal decisions can create.
There’s something about the technique that matters too. Most work either succeeds because it’s all signal—every choice means something, nothing gets wasted—or because it’s pure surface, which is its own kind of skill. Bazan manages both somehow. The space around the figures could just be decoration, but it reads like atmosphere. You could study these pictures as formal exercises in color and shape, or you could just spend time in them and let them be what they are.
If you look long enough, you’ll probably find something of yourself in these pictures. There’s a quality of thinking in them—contradiction, desire, the distance between how you appear and what you’re actually feeling. The work doesn’t explain itself, which I appreciate. It just watches you watching it.