Arca's Artistic Awakening: How Painting Healed Music Burnout
Before achieving global fame as Arca, the electronic musician Alejandra Ghersi was a teenager in Caracas, uploading 3D animations to DeviantArt. Now, at 36, she returns to visual art with her first institutional exhibition at the ICA in London, showcasing paintings that helped her recover from severe burnout after a decade in the music industry.
From Music Meteoric Rise to Creative Crash
Arca's career skyrocketed with eight albums, including the Kick pentalogy, and collaborations with icons like Björk, Rosalía, Beyoncé, and Madonna. However, this success led to exhaustion, causing her to fall out of love with music-making. "I didn't know how to start to make another record," Ghersi admits. Seeking to reconnect with her initial creative passion, she turned to painting as a therapeutic outlet, never intending the works for public display.
The Frenzied Process of Creation
Her paintings, titled Angels, are created with oils, acrylic, spray paint, marker pen, glitter, latex, and melted plastic. Working in a communal yard in Barcelona, Ghersi entered trance-like states, layering canvases in a visceral frenzy. She describes stabbing materials with a knife and overpainting repeatedly, embracing the raw, irreversible nature of physical art. "With a physical medium, it's raw, there's no delete button," she explains, contrasting it with the editable process of music production.
Processing Trauma Through Art
Ghersi reveals that painting became a way to process violences she had survived, compartmentalized to maintain stability. Despite a decade of Jungian psychoanalysis, she found understanding through feeling rather than language. The nightmarish faces in her works—featuring Cheshire cat grins and wide-eyed demons—reflect this cathartic journey. She views them as "mutants and angels," drawing on biblical imagery and post-Darwinian concepts of mutation.
Early Life and Musical Escape
Growing up in Caracas with a well-off family, Ghersi faced isolation due to security concerns and cultural displacement. Moves between Connecticut and Venezuela left her feeling like an outsider, compounded by being in the closet about her queer and transgender identity. Music provided an escape, with her producing electronic tracks prodigiously young, though she often wrote ungendered lyrics to avoid self-betrayal.
Current Projects and Future Hopes
After releasing her last studio album, Kick iiiii, in 2021, Ghersi has returned to music with new tracks like Sola and Puta, crediting painting for her healing. She remains hopeful for Venezuela's LGBTQ+ community despite machismo and political challenges, having DJed there with Amnesty International's support. "The psyche is miraculous," she reflects, emphasizing how trauma can lead to recombination and survival.
Arca's exhibition at the ICA in London runs from 4 to 19 April, marking a full-circle moment from her DeviantArt days to institutional recognition.
