Review: Iffa Terrorgarden

They're white and fluffy, with big pink eyes and, sometimes, a blue mane and a pink diamond on their heads. They glide through enigmatic settings, smiling and lush, but they don't turn down blood if the chance comes along. They're called iffas and they've landed in our imagination to show us the link between the ugly and the beautiful, those two aesthetic categories that are so far apart and so close together.

"Blood & serum, beauty & terror"

It isn't a Red Hot Chili Peppers album, it's the title the series Paula Avalos, alias Iffa Terrorgarden, has come up with for the series she's been painting since 2015, starring these imaginary creatures.

Creatures that reproduce, as in the oil on canvas titled Desove. The contrast between the iffa's dazzling skin, the roughness of the stone and the stormy atmosphere opens up a world loaded with mystery and very much alive natures. The iffa, always sure of herself, even while spawning, moves gracefully in a gloomy setting, crawling with snakes and bats, with an erupting volcano and a mysterious mansion behind the flowers.

Creatures that also die, as in Old Dead Iffa. Part of the skin on the head and the neck has fallen away, exposing the skull and the vertebrae. But the big pink eye still seems to be examining us while a blue beetle lies belly up. Here, the massive presence of the iffa taking up almost the whole canvas, with barely any landscape behind, and her foreshortened position, show us that this beautiful creature can also be unsettling…

A Venezuelan in Mallorca

Young Paula Avalos lives by the sea in Mallorca. Maybe from her window she finds inspiration for the landscapes that dominate her series on the iffas. Born in Venezuela, she's proud of being self-taught and feels a kinship with Lowbrow, an underground movement that tied bad taste to pop culture and comics.

Pop? Yes. Comics? Absolutely. But we don't think Iffa Terrorgarden's artwork is in bad taste, or that it finds its reason to exist in controversy. The young Venezuelan artist is letting her creative universe steep, starting out from fantasy, gothic literature and manga.

Before arriving at the iffas, Paula showed her credentials with drawings like Reina e hijo (doesn't the queen's face look like a "human iffa"?), the disturbing Experimento or Desayuno con la plaga, an artwork marked by pop surrealism and the grim sense of humour we also enjoy in her iffa series. While they have their coffee and cereal, these kids don't look too worried about the invasion of all sorts of giant critters storming the "Police line do not cross" tape.

Mystery among flowers and abundance

"Why don't you paint something more cheerful? There's already enough pain and bloodshed in the world." And there are already too many impressionist landscapes, aren't there? Iffa Terrorgarden isn't willing to 'monetize herself' and prefers to keep shaping that mysterious world of flowers and abundance, of blood and serum.

As in Aguaclara, a canvas where the iffa appears as a swan with a bloody mouth, ready to fight the snake over its skinned prey. Or in "El jardín de las serpientes", one of her favourite paintings, where we can read the name of the series on a ribbon.

In that series, the magical realism of her drawings has given way to a pop surrealism related to the aesthetics of comics and manga. Her artworks seem to connect above all with a young generation that grew up shut in bedrooms full of action figures, comics you read backwards and novels about the Cthulhu myths.

To her critics, Iffa replies: "They misunderstand me, there's joy and lushness in my paintings, but I feel I'm not being a hypocrite about reality, about the parts of life we'd like to pretend don't exist".

The Venezuelan artist has managed to make her iffas exist, reproduce and die to be born again. We've already seen them at La Nit de L'Art, the exhibition held in September 2015 in Mallorca. And we'd swear one iffa winked one of her enormous eyes at us…

Visit the full gallery of Iffa Terrorgarden here