'"Using a combination of watercolors and graphite, Mexican painter Kikyz1313 renders images that are both gory and gorgeous, painting flowers, children and small animals. But she takes the beauty out of her subjects, instead painting them in various forms of disease and decay. Her works bring visions of human-animal hybrids with ragged flesh and dead, glassy eyes and kids reclined among a beds of crumbling stone and bloody tissue. The end result leaves the viewer somewhere between awed and repulsed. Hi-Fructose spoke with the artist about the intentionally provocative and grotesque imagery in her work.

“I’m trying to build not only an emotional momentum through my work, but also an intellectual exercise by means of each person’s vision of reality. The viewer will face an opposing series of thoughts and emotions, as in the first place he is evoked by the intricate and obsessive detail in forms and technique, pleasant color vibrations and compositions,” said Kikyz. “As the analytic step of perception takes place, and the viewer truly embraces the artwork’s wretched and subversive subject matter, he will generate an opinion and will dialogue with the artwork until in some way or another there will be a modification in the viewer’s common perception of things such as disease or death, which are often rejected states of man that truly defines and recalls our ephemeral existence as well as placing doubt in our vain and materialistic way of experiencing life.”

“I want to share my own vision of life and what I think it matters most, maybe the viewer will relate to my work and solve or have an inner discussion about his own concerns, maybe the viewer will be morally disturbed or will find confusion,” she continued. “In any case my intentions are to open a dialogue and provoke thoughts and reflections, which I think must be always the primordial pursuit of contemporary art.”' - Hi-Fructose