“It all starts with a mental image:an orange that bleeds. Infected with the aesthetics ofJapanese counterculture and Aztec rituals of human sacrifice as a form of poetics, and where cannibalism is presented as a sign to demonstrate contemptfor exasperation, Liza Ambrossio mixes performance, spatial intervention, video, installation, techniques of psychological manipulation, science fiction, eroguru, and witchcraft.”
Liza Ambrossio’s photographic journey is characterized by her ability to outline through images a narrative territory for which each photograph diversifies, concretizes and declines a tale of reality in which we can perceive the participation of a mysterious and violent dimension.
Accompanying us on a journey with explicitly dark and exasperated tones, the author invites us, image after image, to cross a chaotic space in which the pertubating visions are able to evoke the impression of an “underlying”, secret and ancestral world.
At times monstrous, at times magnetic, Liza Ambrossio’s images enliven the anguished and the mortuary, investigating it with formal methods and behaviours that overturn and diverge the classic visual and narrative experience to the point of producing a new look for these representations, whose exceptional contemporaneity does not subtract from, but rather strengthens, the iconographic tradition of these representations.
Oscillating between two narrative and aesthetic registers as different as Japanese counter-culture and the sacrificial iconography of the Aztec culture, this artist’s work takes shape in the elaboration of an intimate landscape in which, through images that are at times highly crude, at others suspended in a surreal atmosphere, she exorcises her own traumas in order to give the world a shouted expression.
Reflecting on her origins and reworking the identity narratives that accompany and characterise her biography, Liza Ambrossio, like a medium, gives life to a collection of spectres, presences and visions, sometimes terrifying and macabre, which nevertheless have the merit of making our anxieties, fears and pain visible and in some way virtually concrete.
Blood Orange is a contemporary portrait of inner and outer chaos. A journey through the monstrous, the dark, the shadowy, the demonic, which tells of the courage to go through ourselves in search of a vision, an image, through which we can fulfil our passions and torments.
Liza Ambrossio (b. 1993) is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works between Spain, France, and Mexico. Her first book The rage of devotion was considered one of the most interesting photo books of the year 2018. Her work has been exhibited internationally and has received important awards and grants, among them the PHotoESPAÑA Descubrimientos, the Prix de Voies Off in Arles, and the Prix pour la photographie Musée du quai Branly.
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