Carlos Pazos

CARLOS PAZOS (Barcelona, 1949).
"I'm going to make me a star".
Photography, ed 16/16
Measurements: 110 x 140 cm; 112 x 142 cm (frame).

In the autumn of 1975, together with photographer Albert Cruells and make-up artist M. J. Carandini, Pazos made a series of twenty-one black and white portraits, simulating the strategies of Hollywood film studios to promote their stars. As a result of his interest in this aesthetic, Pazos began a collection of works: photographs, objects, souvenirs, installations and performances that were building a fictitious personality and narrative. This new project maintained an ironic distance between the artist and his character, and dealt from a critical perspective with the problematic of the image and its value in society. With the series of photographs Voy a hacer de mí una estrella, whose production coincided with Franco's agony and death, the artist began a series of works as an artist-author that would develop over the following five years. The manipulation of his own image as a work, creating a character, is related to attitudes inherited from Dalí and close to Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, in whose work the assumption of the myth is associated with a narcissistic transmutation in the process of conquering a hostile reality.
Carlos Pazos studied architecture in Barcelona, and broadened his artistic knowledge at the Eina School in the same city. He made his debut in 1971 at the Ateneo de Barcelona, and since then has held numerous exhibitions in Spain, Italy and Belgium. He has carried out actions in New York and Barcelona, and participated in "Seny i rauxa: 11 artistas catalans", at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris. He has been awarded the National Prize for Plastic Arts (2004), and is represented at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Fundación La Caixa, the MACBA and the Centro de Arte Santa Mónica in Barcelona, the Museos de Bellas Artes de Álava and Teruel and the Fundación Antonio Pérez in Cuenca. In 2007, the MACBA in Barcelona dedicated an anthological exhibition to him, conceived as an ironic journey through his work.