Ana Laura Aláez

Superficiality, 2003
 Video, 6 min 26 s (music: Girls on Film*,
group formed by Cocó, Mario and Ana Laura) Courtesy of the artist

As the artist herself says, ‘One of the keenest polemics that crop up in artistic creation is the confrontation between what is superficial and what is supposedly transcendental. The world of ideas is conventionally identified with abstraction rather than literality; the banal with first-person stories, the mark of the artist, the confessional and formal beauty. On the subject of gender, we might also say that society has throughout history labelled women as superficial on account of their need to express themselves through their attire. There are still doubts about incompatibility between aesthetics and the profound...)’.

Superficiality is a video which is not limited to the music/image rhythm that can be achieved in a music video but goes on and overflows the aesthetic resolution of video-art. In it Aláez uses one of her most recurrent icons: the bust or head as the most expressive and sculptural part of the body, and make-up as a taboo in art, where a sensuality is revealed that supposedly prevails over the conceptual or metaphysical.

*Cocó and Mario (Ex - Silvania y Cielo) joined Ana Laura to make an electronic music album under the name Girls on Film, as a tribute to the song by Duran Duran.

Horizon, 2005
Video 5 min 48 s (music: Ascii.Disko)
Courtesy of the artist

In 2005 the artist was invited to take part in a pilot TV programme on contemporary art. The original idea was to interview her in her studio. She suggested changing this cliché, which takes it for granted that every artist is connected to a material studio, and suggested that the interview should consist of the production of a music video written and directed by herself. The film material was made into two: on one hand, an action interspersed with an interview, which is what was broadcast on television, and on the other this video as the backing for a pop song with the title Horizon. It was filmed in Madrid in one of the Kio Towers by Philip Johnson. For that reason it has a certain touch of time and place. The music is by Ascii.Disko. It talks about the mark left by a lover on leaving the room. And it’s raining. And he stays in bed holding onto her scent. Dreaming that from now on everything will work out. That love can be a horizon. That it can be real.