Pivot Arts Festival

In Paradise Aliens, Venezuelan artist Alonso Galue presents an arresting series of large-scale murals confronting the fragmented psyche of exile. Drawing from Andean cosmology, tropical fauna, and the chaotic violence of border politics, Galue transforms the gallery into a landscape of surreal resistance, psychological rupture, and mythic guardianship. Rendered in thick, urgent strokes of color, these towering works depict gas-masked figures wandering fields of severed monuments, decapitated heads held aloft, macaw-winged deities watching over rainbow-slashed battlefields, and dreamlike terrains hovering between jungle and sky. The result is a visual grammar of trauma and survival. “Myths are our internal maps,” says Galue. “But when you are forced to leave your homeland, those maps disintegrate. Paradise Aliens is about rebuilding inner geography from memory, fear, and imagination.” Inspired by the visual traditions of Diego Rivera, Leon Golub, and Oskar Kokoschka, Galue merges political violence with poetic symbolism. In these works, Venezuelan trauma meets a global reckoning with migration, authoritarianism, and cultural loss. Animal forms—tapirs, guacamayas, and spectral hybrids—become symbols of both ancestral knowledge and contemporary unease. Painted on paper with visceral urgency, these murals are not simply images—they are acts. They demand space, breath, and reflection. They honor the multiplicity of those who live in exile: foreign yet filled with myth, broken yet building.   PARADISE ALIENS [open exhibition through the 2025-2026 Northwestern University academic year] Wirtz Center Chicago 710 N. Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL 60611