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Before Arca had released eight albums, including her Kick pentalogy; before she had collaborated with Björk and Rosalía and supported Beyoncé and Madonna in concert; the electronic musician, real name Alejandra Ghersi, was a young teen in her Caracas bedroom, uploading 3D animations to DeviantArt, the early-00s social media site for artists.

“As many renderings as my family’s computer could handle,” the 36-year-old recalls. This interest in visual art comes full circle when the musician opens her first institutional exhibition at the ICA in London.

Her medium now is painting, thickly layering canvases with oils, acrylic, spray paint, marker pen, glitter, latex and melted plastic. From this graffitied impasto, nightmarish faces emerge: Cheshire cat grins, gurning clowns and wide-eyed demons. They were never meant to be shown publicly, Ghersi embarking on them as a way of getting over the “burnout” she experienced from a meteoric decade in the music industry.

“It was an attempt to reconnect with the creative enthusiasm I had when I started out in music, first as a hobby and a passion, before seeing it as a profession,” Ghersi says. “I fell out of love with making music for a while. I didn’t know how to start to make another record.

“I got one canvas, and then another, and then another, experimenting. I could feel myself going into a trance-like state, just trying to develop different techniques of creating texture. When recording music, it can be overwritten or re-recorded. You can always undo things. With a physical medium, it’s raw, there’s no delete button.”

The paintings, collectively titled Angels, were made in a communal yard she shares with her neighbours in Barcelona, where the Venezuelan now lives. Ghersi says each work was composed quite viscerally and sometimes produced in a frenzy, painting and overpainting, melting plastic on to the surface of a work and even stabbing the materials with a knife.

“It was a way of processing different violences that I had survived, those I compartmentalised to make my life seem more stable.” Does she mean that painting provided a kind of therapy? “Even after a decade of Jungian psychoanalysis, I realised understanding was not going to be found through language but through feeling. I probably scared my neighbours a lot.”

Conversations with Ghersi, who is queer and transgender, diverge from the intensely personal, to deep dives into Old Testament images of godly wrath, 11th-century mystics or psychoanalysis. She says she sees the paintings as being both “mutants and angels”.

“For me, mutation is a form of becoming in a very post-Darwinian way of understanding biology and natural phenomena that constitute our cosmos. Biblical representations of angels describe them as a tumult of wings and eyes, not these sweet cherubim. It’s as abject as you get.”

She says that her days on DeviantArt were born of an isolated childhood. The family were well-off, but the security situation in Caracas meant she couldn’t go out on her own and she felt at odds with her preppy school friends. With her father’s job in finance they had moved to Connecticut when she was three, where no one could pronounce her name, and then when they moved back to Caracas in 1998, her Venezuelan friends referred to her as “gringo”, given how North Americanised her accent had become. She was also in the closet: “A very strict closet … I would literally pray every night for God to change me into a straight cis person.”

It was music, however, that enabled her escape, and she produced electronic tracks when she was prodigiously young. She became something of a phenomenon on the local scene, even if her parents had to accompany her to gigs. “I would write love songs without really having ever been in love. I felt I was betraying myself though, as I’d always write the lyrics ungendered or keep the pronouns vague.”

Having turned 18, a move back to the US to study at NYU brought freedom, her real education provided by the club scene. She shed her old stage name and released her first EP under the name Arca. More music followed, her sound veering between the ethereal and poppy to industrial and glitchy reggaeton, the vocals switching freely between Spanish and English. The album art, music videos and stage shows, all of which Arca was intimately involved in, are no less experimental. She sang about sex and falling in love with men.

Ghersi has gone back to play in Venezuela, DJing for a Boiler Room party two years ago, but says even then Amnesty International sent representatives, a precaution given how many LGBTQ+ Venezuelans were present. “It’s so Orwellian there and it’s only gotten worse, especially with the recent US intervention. There’s a lot of machismo, very patriarchal attitudes. I have hope things will get better and that we’ll be able to build a community again.”

Kick iiiii, her last studio album, was released in 2021 and, although Arca has been performing live and producing, no new material of her own appeared until two tracks popped up a year ago, the dreamy Sola, and an aggressively horny rap titled Puta. Now a full album is forthcoming, she says, thanks to the healing she was able to work through on canvas.

“The psyche is miraculous,” Ghersi says. “Over the course of time we fragment and fracture through trauma, and hopefully somehow recombine and stay steady enough to survive and, if you’re lucky, reach a point where it’s safe to unpack those experiences.”

• Arca is at ICA, London, 4-19 April