In the pictorial universe of Lauren Wy (Los Angeles) -- disrupting trite terms, one might call it an “iconographic cosmos” – there appears an unprecedented figure regenerates an aesthetic and conceptual paradigm that combines solemnity and mystery, embodying a hybrid and liminal figure: the woman-angel (-alien). This flamboyant archetype, jolted between empyrean and earthly transience, between the concreteness of the real and the ephemerality of the virtual, synthesizes radical opposites, social and psychological, translated to the present day.
On the one hand, the fallen angel manifests itself, rebellious, hapless and tragic, an emblem of a restless, transgressive and shadowy sensuality; on the other, the fighting angel recurs, a speculative and moral figure, a herald of light and truth. Wy masterfully fits into this dialectical space, harking back to the biblical tradition and filtering it with fine sensitivity, capturing the adherent depiction of a disjointed, postmodern world; a world that flows viscously beyond its boundaries, apprehending extraterrestrial and hallucinatory presences. Her works not only describe, but deeply interrogate the construction of identity -- especially female identity -- and the complexity of human experience.
Wy's project - a veritable new manifesto of her poetics - is punctuated by a dense and conscious dialogue with the Western artistic and literary tradition; among the earliest sources is John Milton's Paradise Lost, which features and twists the fall of rebellious angels not only as a gesture of defiance, but as an aspiration for the autonomy of existence - the unspeakable and paradoxical emancipation from the origin of time and space, that is, from God. Wy's angel is both heroic disobedience and atonement in power; a prism through which universal themes such as desire, alienation and change are fragmented and disarticulated. As this angel wanders with flaking wings, the provocation of sin and the urgency of redemption, the fragility of the flesh and the regenerative tenacity of the spirit are intertwined.
Wy's canvases are inhabited by figures that multiply and merge into dynamic yet unchanging postures, suspended between the orgiastic, the everyday and the contemplative. The vibrant, incandescent, often soured colors and incisively marked lines contrasted with ethereal glazing endow them with a dramatic force that challenges the gaze and transports it to a dimension where eroticism and transcendence interpenetrate. The female body, in Wy’s vision, becomes a nucleus of plural subjectivities, a metaphor for the tension between conformity and authentication of the self. Every object contributes as a narcissistic reflection: cars, webcams, candles and other recurring elements, totemic but blurred in the multitude of happenings of the scene, transcend their functional role to be charged with allegorical values: it is the iconography of the tangibility of memory, a vehicle of cultural models and personal awareness that interact with the artist's inner, dreamlike settings.
Wy's research is conceived as a travelogue - ultramundane, perhaps hellish - in which the pictorial language is articulated in a layered, multimedia narrative. Through a wide range of techniques, from wax pastels to oil tempera to video editing to the use of artificial intelligence, the artist brings to life a narrative of rare density. In this mature phase, the angel of chaos emerges as the distinctive feature of a poetics that interweaves sacred and profane, earthly and celestial, religious iconography - from the Archangel Michael to the uprising and fall of rebellious angels - symptomatic of a collective morality, and a sharp deconstruction of today's age marked by apathy and increasingly rarefied connections.
The exhibition is thus an investigation of femininity as an act of creation and rebellion – even a destructive one, provided the end be rebirth. Desire, understood as a generative force, transforms the fall into a prelude to ascension. The woman-alien, or angel of chaos, is not just a dichotomous figure, but a manifestation of synthesis: guilt and salvation, body and spirit, secular limit and fantastic possibility. In a gesture reminiscent of Miltonian tension, Lauren Wy invites reflection on the deeper essence of freedom, suggesting that between light and shadow, between grace and fall, lies the irreducible complexity of existence.
Federica Maria Giallombardo
