Who’s afraid of Lyz Parayzo? [Quem tem medo de Lyz Parayzo?]
What we usually witness in the art system and what involves all its legitimation throughout history is the phallocentrism and vigor of a society supported by patriarchal and hetero-cis-normative logic, where there was only room for dichotomous roles rigidly labeled.
To disobey this “rule” and break these precepts is to propose alternatives to destabilize a world still situated around such codes that are already familiar, outdated, pre-established and, to give visibility to her production, initially Lyz Parayzo, as a terrorist whore, invades consecrated art spaces to “bombard” them with her existence as an artist, where she institutes a fissure in what institutions understand with a rigor that cannot be dissuaded. Today, after such a strategy, the artist is already inserted in a certain way in such a context, but that does not mean she is satisfied with how it works.
With biting humor, Lyz Parayzo shakes off these rigid principles through a reinterpretation of the classic text “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1962) by Edward Albee to title her exhibition, which brings together reinterpretations of Lygia Clark’s classic sculptures begun in the 1960s. In this relationship between a dramatic text and a series of sculptures, Lyz mentions both her initial training in performing arts and , later, in visuals, as well as the decadent ruling class of the academic environment that produces thought and that legitimizes an entire vicious system by quoting Albee and, at the same time, praises the female voice in the arts when it suggests and sublimates Clark.
Yes, times have really changed! And, thinking about the production of armor, war jewelry and objects toothed like saws to precisely mean protection for the so-called “deviant” bodies, which are condemned within a still conservative context, it is no longer possible to reinforce attributes conferred on the masculine or feminine and Parayzo know it well. All these codes are mixed and, therefore, even thinking about aggressive or decorative artifacts, we do not suppose in Lyz’s pieces, on one hand, virile, fearless, brave, muscular cisgender men, warriors and, on the other, dreamy, fragile cis women, sensitive and romantic.
There is a huge amalgamation in her guerrilla tactics and, through the works on display, Parayzo suppresses the norm, rejects the instituted, satirizes an order built in a scathing way in her politically engaged propositions that affirm multiple subjectivities outside of a normative social construction. And whoever is afraid of Lyz Parayzo is precisely everything that symbolizes a past defeated by losing meaning, which today does not pulse in favor of countless singularities, but which withers day by day when it insists on the hierarchy of our existences.
