Osailys Avila Milián, better known in the artistic field as Osy, is a creator who despite her novice career already collects deeply emotionally charged works. She has managed to be inserted with her own, frank, spontaneous language, mixing references of dissimilar sources to address in each of her series, issues related to her personal experiences, but without being autobiographical, at least in the strictest sense. In exhibitions such as No return or Fragile, Osy has collected teenage imaginary masterfully linking two seemingly antagonistic elements: childhood naiveté and some perversion inherent to adulthood. The painting process is linked to the existential process and his experiences, maybe a little bit fabled, are reflected in canvasses that often feature large formats. The works appear as species of chapters interconnected by a special narrative. Each image is remarkably suggestive. They also engender reflection of sociological nature which results in the characterization of a developmental stage of the individual, with symptoms that are common and others that depend on the time when occurring. Contemporary teen with Osy, indirectly forms part of the works as this “social group” is deconstructed from the inside, since she is also part of it.
Her most recent works denote a link of her poetry. The themes are no longer as descriptively experiential but far more elaborated, passed by the filter of subjectivity, without abandoning her characteristic imaginary.
In formal terms, we can realize how in the pieces of her beginning, it was perceived more strongly a propensity to punk, psychedelic, the Japanese iconography, the latter is now more subtly present. The new production seems to be quieter and incorporates advertising icons as well as some influence of comics and design. It gets nurtured from the staunchest pop, betting on the color intensity and visual stridency. Her pictures are great provocations, large planes of colors that live, get contaminated, refuse each other, and expand in an arbitrary and inconsistent universe. And they are unprejudiced, frank, bold, and intense. Her disquieting pictorial universes have their own life and infect the viewer with the vibration generated by their colors.
Osy is irreverent but very focused on her work and consistent in her ideological-aesthetic approaches. Through her portraits, sometimes anonymous- she emphasizes themes that had been targeted from the previous series such as sex, alcohol, drugs, consumer goods, fashion, and artificiality. In these pieces they take on a more grandiose sense that speaks of how these topics are strongly related in shaping / projection of the identity of the contemporary subject. She also uses her own experience as an artist and also moves these concepts to the plane of the laws of art itself, to determine what its implications in today’s society are. That is, she is interested in seeing how artistic production is linked to different categories generating thus binomials such as art and consumption, art and fashion, and art and market.
Her works try to explore the relationship between supposedly incompatible symbolic codes, to give them a different meaning from art. With the plurality of formal and conceptual ingredients she is able to create a very special world that transgresses the laws of nature. Green or blue men, wearing umbrellas decorated with Mickey Mouse, live in the pictorial space with flocks of birds; as well as girls who develop a very special relationship with cats. The human- animal bond is put at the same level of that of the man-object, whether he uses a sunshade, a cell phone, even the world of fashion, concept objectified in certain components such as tattooing or peculiar way of painting your nails, for example. Thus she speaks of relativity of the natural and artificial and the thin boundaries between the two. She is also a partaker of the idea of objectification of human beings and the sense of alienation become sort of identifying feature of characters who, like her, are looking for their place in the world.
Her painting is genuine and provocative, two elements of great value when judging a piece; a painting where fiction and reality converge, where signs become blurred, where the seemingly trivial takes on a staggering sense and vice versa.
