Y lo peor, sucedía siempre en los sueños: Carlos Pazos

It is the 50th anniversary of Voy a hacer de mí una estrella, the photographic series with which Carlos Pazos hypnotized us with an attractive image of himself. In it, a solid repertoire of gestures and attitudes allowed him to reconfigure his image to radiate the appeal of a star, of a popular icon. A process of seduction whose main target was, however, Pazos himself.

Such operation - as is typical in almost all of the artist's career - carries on the surface a marked sense of humor, despite being at heart a dramatic gesture. With works like the one mentioned above, Pazos questioned any system of representation: the image can no longer evoke any reality and the ego is born of fiction. A characteristic that would become the hallmark of much of the artist's artistic production, since from 1975 he began a series of works as an artist-actor that would develop especially during the following five years and up to the present day.

Precisely, Carlos Pazos now renews the approach rehearsed fifty years ago to manipulate once again the self-image and turn it into a work of art. In this case, a new photographic series entitled Más cornadas da el arte (2025): four new vertical portraits made in collaboration with the photographer Roberto Ruiz.

With it, Pazos gives continuity to that gesture of appropriating attitudes close to Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys or Elvis himself. But this time the self conversion into a myth does not project a hope of stardom, but the opposite. The irony and the narcissistic game are still there, but in this case that self-attraction is complemented by an air of weariness rather than illusion.