Stellarhighway is thrilled to present Hunter, a solo presentation by Amalia Angulo. This group of nine new canvases centers around images of seductive, voluptuous women and animals amidst the jungle, probing ideas of domesticity, civility and wild seed of our species.
Angulo’s practice interrogates human psychology through stylized vignettes of doll-like figures that masterfully tread between the idyllic and the unsettling. Depicting exaggerated and heavily sexualized bodies, her subjects confront us with disconcerting, wide-eyed gazes and stiff smiles. These saturated works aim to deconstruct notions of perfection and imposed limitations of being, visually riffing on art history and other sources ranging from newspaper comicstrips to mid-twentieth century pin ups.
Hunter continues the artist’s exploration with viciously direct paintings linking myths of the Wild Woman of the Woods; Freud's theories of ego/id/superego and eros/thanatos; and, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's philosophies of freedom and human prehistory, while being formally reminiscent of folk art, and the paintings of Fernando Botero and Henri Rousseau. Utilizing this milieu of tropes, Angulo begins a loose narrative with The Bather, a classic portrait of a docile female figure sitting in a glade, calmly watching and waiting. Her rouged cheek gently resting on her lifted knees, which in turn force soft folds of flesh to gather around her belly. In Woman and Lion and Woman Playing with Lion and Tiger, we find this wavy-haired protagonist communing with wild animals. In Woman in the Forest and Stalker, the protagonist slowly recedes into the depths of the dark woods, perhaps changing into the well-coiffed beast of Lion Hiding before being found feasting upon her prey in the titular piece Hunter.
Angulo’s narrative here is one of transformation, not just of this supernatural female hunter, but of humanity, from “wild” to “civilized,” apparently through the taming power of male authority (see, Woman Smiling). Vase with Tiger and Flowers shows this psychologically and physiologically mutative process as complete, or nearly so: a small house tiger prancing proudly atop a table decorated by a house human. The human (our protagonist, the supernatural hunter?) is left undepicted, only a presence felt by the force of the arranged domestic space. However, Angulo’s narrative also tells of an ability to return to one’s wild nature, that the domestication of human and beast is not linear, but instead perhaps more of a fluid state based on desire and need.
