Lima, Perú based in Barcelona
The Altar
Donde guardo mi fe
In Donde guardo mi fe, Vallejo presents a piece that is both altar and confession. The work belongs to a larger project exploring dreams, the occult, symbolism, and collective subconscious. Suspended in space by chains, the metallic cross becomes a charged container an inherited symbol reconfigured to hold personal spirituality. It speaks not of religion, but of memory, intuition, and ancestral imprint.
Though not religious in practice, Vallejo acknowledges the lingering weight of a Catholic upbringing in Latin America. In moments of vulnerability, the word “God” escapes her lips almost unconsciously. Rather than reject this inherited language, she chooses to honour it transforming it into something personal, instinctive, and real. The cross becomes home to nine beliefs: love, peace, mother earth and her alchemy, connection, dreams and the subconscious, magic and the occult, light and darkness, the cosmos, and multidimensionality. These are not doctrines, but frequencies intangible truths that structure her inner cosmology.
At the heart of the piece, a photograph rendered with delicate precision becomes a visual offering. It evokes transformation, sensuality, and impermanence. Through this visual altar, Vallejo reclaims a religious form to hold a radically personal form of faith one rooted in emotion, memory, and poetic vision. Her work becomes an invitation to pause and ask: where, and in what, do we place our faith?
El Altar Rojo
A wooden table, carved in a Balinese style, was carefully refurbished and transformed into an altar. At its centre, beneath a protective glass layer, lies one of my photographs: cherries lit by flash in the dark. The cherry deep red, plump, ripe and luminous against the black evokes cycles of ripening, offering, and transformation. But also, sensuality and temptation. It is a fruit that stains fingers, lips, memory. It recalls ancestral rituals and the feminine connection to nature, regeneration, and intuition. There is a quiet tension in the image: beauty held in stillness, fullness on the edge of decay. This piece became the natural altar to Donde guardo mi fe. It grounds the cross in something tactile and symbolic an object that invites presence, offering, and reflection. This one holds space. It supports the cross not as an object of worship, but as a container of belief mine, yours, and everything that exists in between.
In many traditions, altars act as portals between worlds, places where intention meets matter. Here, that function is reimagined. El Altar Rojo bridges the visible and the invisible, the personal and the universal, anchoring the spiritual language of the work in a form that is quiet yet loud in meaning.
Paz Vallejo
Paz Vallejo (Lima, Peru, 1996) is a visual artist working with photography and moving image, currently based in Barcelona. Her practice spans digital photography, analogue medium format, 16mm film, VHS textures, printed textiles, and installation. Vallejo is known for her intuitive use of colour and contrast, her sensitivity to light and shadow, and her ability to craft emotionally resonant imagery that oscillates between introspection and poetic symbolism.
Instagram: @paaazvallejo
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