Arca's nightmarish canvases: from burnout to raw creation

Alejandra Ghersi, the Venezuelan electronic Music producer known as Arca, has long blurred the lines between sound and visual art. Now, after a period of intense burnout that threatened to halt her career, those blurred lines have sharpened into a striking debut exhibition at London’s ICA – a collection of paintings as unsettling as they are compelling.

A decade of sonic ascent, a crisis of creative exhaustion

Arca's rise has been meteoric. From uploading 3D animations as a teenager in Caracas to supporting musical titans like Beyoncé and Madonna, her journey has been marked by innovation and a relentless artistic vision. But a decade of relentless touring and production took its toll. “I fell out of love with making Music for a while,” Ghersi admits, “I didn’t know how to start to make another record.” The solution, surprisingly, wasn’t more therapy, but a return to a primal form of expression: painting.

Angels emerging from impasto: a visceral release

The resulting collection, titled Angels, isn't the work of a trained painter. Instead, it’s a testament to raw, unfiltered emotion. Thick layers of oil, acrylic, spray paint, marker pen, glitter, latex, and even melted plastic are violently applied to the canvases, creating a textured impasto from which emerge nightmarish figures – Cheshire cat grins, gurning clowns, and wide-eyed demons. “It was a way of processing different violences that I had survived,” Ghersi reveals, hinting at a deeper narrative behind the unsettling imagery.

What distinguishes these works isn’t technical skill, but the process itself. Unlike Music, where mistakes can be erased, the physicality of painting demands a confrontation with imperfection. “With a physical medium, it’s raw, there’s no delete button,” she explains. The communal yard in Barcelona, where the paintings were created, became a space for experimentation—and occasionally, cathartic frenzy. She reportedly stabbed materials with a knife, melting plastic directly onto the surface—a deliberate rejection of control.

From deviantart to jungian analysis: a life in flux

The impulse to create visually isn’t new for Ghersi. Her early explorations on DeviantArt, fueled by an isolated childhood in Caracas and a difficult adolescence navigating identity and belonging, foreshadowed her current artistic trajectory. Growing up in a wealthy family, she was restricted from outdoor activities due to security concerns, leading to a sense of detachment from her peers. Further complicating matters was her experience as a queer, transgender individual struggling with a deeply internalized sense of shame. “A very strict closet… I would literally pray every night for God to change me into a straight cis person,” she recalls, a stark reminder of the internal battles that shaped her artistic voice.

While a decade of Jungian psychoanalysis offered some understanding, Ghersi ultimately found solace not in language, but in feeling. Her paintings, she says, are a “tumult of wings and eyes,” a far cry from the conventional image of cherubic angels—a deliberate embrace of the abject and the monstrous.

A new album and a renewed psyche

The healing process wrought through painting has, in turn, renewed her creative spark. A new album is forthcoming, built upon the foundation of emotional clarity she discovered on canvas. “The psyche is miraculous,” Ghersi states, “Over the course of time we fragment and fracture through trauma, and hopefully somehow recombine and stay steady enough to survive.” And with the Angels exhibition, Arca offers not just a glimpse into her personal struggles, but a powerful demonstration of art's capacity for transformation, proving that even from the darkest of places, something startlingly beautiful can emerge.