Toward the end of the film Paz de la Huerta directed, Pupa Papa Puta, the artist is seen sweeping the scattered limbs of a life-sized doll that was chucked onto a city backstreet, eventually stripped and torn apart. The doll and de la Huerta’s character are interchangeable reflections of one another. Blood and dirt cling to her nude body in this final scene, where de la Huerta does what she has been doing in real life for years: sweeping up her broken self, and then, vulnerable and naked, stepping into whatever lies ahead. It hasn’t been easy.
This moving 2005 piece can be seen at de la Huerta’s first solo film and painting exhibition at Ruttkowski;68 gallery in Paris, “El Vallé de Lagrimas,” which runs through July 28. “My saving’s grace was art,” the actor, who has been painting since she was a child, told me earlier this month during a walkthrough of her show. “It would be nice to see this flourish into something big. I kind of painted myself out of hell.”
An installation view of “El Vallé de Lagrimas” by Paz de la Huerta. Courtesy of the artist and Ruttkowski;68.
Throughout the highs and lows of de la Huerta’s life and career, art has been a constant. The show’s 14 paintings, with their “outsider” or self-taught feel, plus four moving films, are also windows into her subconscious and have helped de la Huerta get through the worst of it. Indeed, the show title translates as “Valley of Tears,” and refers to “a prayer in the bible about the end of suffering,” de la Huerta explained. With her spiritual subjects steeped in Catholic imagery, these charged, rawly naïve paintings could almost be alternative forms of prayer themselves.
Born in 1984 as María de la Paz Elizabeth Sofía Adriana de la Huerta y Bruce, she has gained a cult, indie-rock-style following for her rebelliousness in life and art. Having inspired directors like Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, and Gaspar Noé, for whom she co-starred in the art film Enter the Void (2009). De la Huerta also had well-known roles in The Cider House Rules (1999) as a teen and is perhaps best known for her uncanny portrayal as the damaged (and damaging) dancer Lucy in the HBO prohibition period drama Boardwalk Empire. Often cast in sexualized roles, her nude body has been an open part of how she freely expresses herself, but she says this has also led to some suffering. “I was crucified for it,” she told me.
Paz de la Huerta. self portrait and crying angels and nastya (2018). Courtesy of the artist and Ruttkowski;68
One doesn’t need to know about de la Huerta’s Hollywood persona to appreciate her art. Her works come to its own, strange and dreamlike life. Densely packed layers of watercolor or ink are often sealed with an undulating and distorting layer of oil resin, a component harder to convey in digital reproductions. “I never know when to finish a painting,” de la Huerta said of this technique, which cannot be easily controlled—a quality she seeks. “The resin dries it, and I can’t touch it again. It forces me to stop.”
While painting, which de la Huerta has been doing outdoors on a secluded farm where she’s lived for two years, the artist says she enters a similarly unconstrained, trance-like process guided by a greater force. “Sometimes I get an idea or an image of what I want, but even that process is God speaking through me,” she said. “With the films I direct and the paintings I make, I feel like art unveils itself, and not the other way around,” she added.
Paz de la Huerta, “oh father” crying angels and dogs (2018). Courtesy of the artist and Ruttkowski;68.
While growing up in Soho around other artists, de la Huerta got in the habit of pushing against any inclination to keep things hemmed in. “I was always a rebel,” she said about her school years. She was accepted to the progressive Saint Anne’s School in Brooklyn on a full scholarship, also famously attended by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and was allowed to spend her days in a large art studio, doing as she pleased. “The principal told me that I didn’t have to go to class and could just paint,” she said. They’re not in the show, but these early works are a window to her life and her later work. “You really see how tortured I was,” she said about these paintings.
De la Huerta has a lot to exorcise from her complex life’s saga in her works. She accused Harvey Weinstein of two rapes in 2010 and won a settlement in 2020. The artist has also spent time in psychiatric institutions, which she says were forced upon her by her family, whom she is also suing for sexual abuse and happen to be Spanish nobility. Her parents deny any wrongdoing.
“I suffered from a lot of abuse in my life, a lot of trauma,” she said. “So my art has been how I’ve been healing.”
Paz de la Huerta, still from El Vallé de lagrimas (2011-2015). Courtesy of the artist and Ruttkowski;68.
Crying angels and sidelong, piercing glances, lend an unnerving quality to what might seem at first like joyful scenes of children playing in bucolic landscapes, or, as she calls them, “fairy forests.” While making a series of these “ferry forest” paintings, “I was far from any happy environment,” she explained. “So it was kind of a longing. Dreaming of ‘paz’ returning to Paz.” In Spanish, “paz” means “peace.”
There is also a self-portrait with her former therapist, including quotes from their sessions and another of herself as a small and bruised child, sitting beside her cigar-smoking father. All around the duo and curled into corners, hanging from the branch of a tree, winged angels weep. “I just thought this crying angel was the most beautiful thing I ever saw and I put them in all my paintings,” she said. “I also felt like it was kind of the deepest part of my soul. How I feel very deep down. I mean, all this tragedy in my life.”
El Vallé de Lagrimas by Paz de la Huerta installation. Courtesy of the artist and Ruttkowski;68
The artist, who is inspired by fellow “outsider” artist Henry Darger, as well as Francesco Clemente, who wrote the poetic exhibition text, plus Francisco Goya, and Diego Velásquez, among others, also likes to paint portraits of a beloved, inbred tiger with Down syndrome named Kenny. She even tried to visit him in Arkansas once, only to learn he had died years earlier. De la Huerta sees similar motivations to the tiger’s fate and the maintenance of her own family’s noble bloodline while noting that incest is a recurring theme throughout many of her works.
Paz de la Huerta. animal angels (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Ruttkowski;68.
At a dinner following the show opening, the artist, who wore a simple, silky white, strapless dress edged with a chiffon ruffle she had made, her hair swooped in a loose updo, offered a personally dedicated painting of the tiger to another Kenny, the artist and Artnet columnist Kenny Schachter, who curated the exhibition. Schachter joined other dinner guests like actors Matt Dillon (who pounded so loudly on the front door when he arrived, that the room practically jumped), James Franco, photographer Ellen von Unwerth, and director Gaspar Noé. Schachter said he met de la Huerta through the Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard, who wanted to include her in an exhibit they were organizing. De la Huerta’s idea was to show herself holding a baby, both covered in blood. That proposal wasn’t in the cards, but it eventually led to a new friendship, and Schachter’s discovery of her paintings. He spoke to Ruttkowski;68 founder Nils Müller about the artist, who now officially represents her.
For the last few years, de la Huerta says she feels “safe,” while living on a farm whose location she says she can’t disclose, because she fears her family may find her. She also says she has found a kind of happiness and perhaps some of the peace that her name, Paz, signifies. “I’ve had to be really brave and I had to rescue myself. It’s not like anyone was going to rescue me. Not any man—no one,” she said.
Paz de la Huerta, showgirl, circus, nastya and leos and crying angels (2018). Courtesy of the artist and Ruttkowski;68.
A shift is also reflected in the more recent paintings in the show, which are chromatically lighter, and compositionally less packed in. “Now, my angels’ eyes are sometimes opening, and I like to believe they cry sometimes with happiness. I just feel they’re starting to awaken. You can interpret that in so many ways,” she said.
These days de la Huerta has been painting more than ever, while working on her memoir, and several film projects, including one about the life of Rita Hayworth with Ellen von Unwerth. She recently acted in a Spanish film called The Roots, and hopes to finish a film in the show about her life, which shares the exhibit’s title, El Vallé de Lagrimas. It still needs one, final scene.
Paz de la Huerta, fairy forest (2018). Courtesy of the artist and Ruttkowski;68.
“I was raped. Somebody tried to kill me,” she narrates in the film. “I had chronic pain. I overcame chronic pain. I had drug addiction. I overcame drug addiction. There was an ominous curse on me. And all the while, all along, it was a spiritual journey. I was lost and I was found.”
“El Vallé de Lagrimas” is on view through July 28 at Ruttkowski;68 at 8 Rue Charlot in Paris 75003.
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