Carlos Pazos condenses part of his creative universe in this installation. On the one hand, his interest in language games, with a title that links the artist’s surname to the old Greek word pathos. On the other, his passion for objects of mass culture and cinema, his aesthetic affinity to the language of Pop and the recurring presence of the artist’s ‘self’. As Pazos explained in 1998: ‘With this “climatic piece”, as I prefer to call this type of setting to avoid the imprecise term “installation” […] I try to pay a veiled homage to the films produced and directed by Roger Corman, adapted from the tales of E.A. Poe, and interpreted by my beloved Vincent Price.’ In this ambient or ‘climatic’ piece, Pazos reconstructs the setting of a bourgeois home with a fireplace in a wallpapered room, a picture on top of the fireplace and a life-sized bear standing next to it. Artificial fire wood indicates that the fire is lit. Against this peaceful bourgeois setting, the threatening figure of an animal looms large. Irony is a constant in the work of Carlos Pazos, as are autobiographical games. The picture on the wall, a portrait of the artist with a frightened expression on his face embracing a doll, suggests a horror movie and plays with the likeness between the artist and Vincent Price, the star of many films directed by Roger Corman, an American filmmaker known for a series of B-movies based on the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. The work, from 1981, was reconstructed in 1992. Mi pathos doy plays with the phonetic similarity between the artist’s surname and the Greek word pathos, designating passion or emotional intensity. As in ancient Greek tragedy, Pazos offers himself to the spectator or sacrifices himself as an object of passion whose destiny is no longer in his hands. As in many of Pazos’ works, the object of this piece is the artistic subject himself: the ‘self’ turned into a work of art. At the same time, the title also plays with the words pronounced by the priest at the end of the Mass: Mi paz os doy (My peace I give to you). As Pazos explains: ‘I play phonetically with my surname, with the sense of the Greek word pathos, and with the words addressed by the priest to the brethren at the end of the Catholic Church’s ritual: Mi paz os doy.’ (Carlos Pazos, Fromage de Tête. Verona: Adriano Parise Editore, 1998, pp. 21–22 [exh. cat.]). Animal figures are widely used by the artist, whether in the form of soft toys, natural science museum specimens such as butterflies or hares, plaster imitations of ornithological collections, or even live animals such as chimpanzees. Pazos is a well-known collector of all kinds of objects from mass culture shown in installations of carnivalesque, theatrical aesthetics, close to the visual codes of Pop. Yet despite his passion for collecting (Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Marcel Broodthaers, three refererents in Pazos’ work, were all collectors), his use of objects does not articulate an art of memory: things are outside real time.