Violeta Paez Armando

Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Artist statement

Violeta Paez Armando is a multidisciplinary Amsterdam-based Argentinian artist working with sculpture and writing. Using elements such as resin, wax, metal and found industrial objects, their practice is, at its core, a form of material world-building. Strongly influenced by mythology and sci-fi, they revisit the past through a queer lens and construct objects where the “strange” becomes a model to reflect on queer futurity and desire. Within this framework, they explore the transformative potential of monstrosity. Paez Armando produces works that range from hand-sized objects to large-scale installations. The process embraces the grotesque and the cinematic, informed by body horror and the prosthetic ingenuity of 1980s film prop-making, when the monstrous was sculpted, weighty, and hand-built. Surfaces shift between slimy, rough, glossy, and leaking, creating works that oscillate between delicacy and monstrosity, attraction and repulsion, bodily and alien. Archival and cinematic imagery often surfaces within installations, operating as fragments of parallel timelines. Writing, too, plays a sculptural role: experimental, intimate texts that are visceral, erotic, and obsessive. These appear as publications or readings that activate the work, fictionalizing it through mythology, film, and personal accounts. Speculative fiction is a guiding principle. Following a lineage of Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, Paez approaches science fiction, horror, and fantasy not only as...

Artwork