Tamara Alves // solo exhibition

Repeating over and over this line from the poem “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg in her mind while she works, like some sort of mantra, Tamara Alves has been weaving a narrative that celebrates in a raw, poetic way the primeval vitality of strong sensations, of an animal becoming, of brute passion, as opposed to rational deliberation.

Based on the idea that our instincts are what defines us, the artist presents in her first solo show at Underdogs a set of works painted on various media and in various formats – acrylic on canvas, watercolours, sketches with coloured pencils – which, invoking a universe of (female) human and animal figures in interaction with the natural landscape and objects imbued with a strong symbolic charge (the car, in a clear allusion to the visceral passion explored by David Cronenberg in “Crash”), invite us to embrace feelings as a wild and untamed driving force. A universe where love, always love (which is wound, pain, tears, but not less pleasure, joy, ecstasy), can be the fruit of an impact, an accident, growing within us like a wild flower. A universe where the night is synonymous with release and fierceness, when lovers meet and wolves set out. A universe that evokes and invokes the primordial viscerality contained in the non-conformed howl as a metaphor for the courage we lack to bite into and seize that which we need.