Una cara extraña
Solo show by Álvaro García
Una cara extraña
Solo show by Álvaro García
17 May - 23 June 2023
Credits
Elena Feduchi
The exhibitions of graduate students from the Faculties of Fine Arts have brought us closer to a generation of artists at an incipient as well as crucial moment; this exercise, posed as a post-academic experience, has sometimes resulted in an opportunity to discover languages unexpected as well as solid. That is the case of Álvaro García: an artist exploring the limits of his own universe but recognisable by us all, making use of painting as a medium that is in a way reminiscent of classical schools and yet, with subjects that speak of an extraterrestrial timelessness.
In this exhibition we approach painting again, but this time from a strange figuration. Álvaro proposes a universe that seems to be from the future, in static and almost improbable scenarios; in his characters we understand humanity seen through the possibilities that destiny has prepared for us as species. There is a tenderness in the restlessness of these friezes that, with meticulous technique, the artist presents to us as offerings brought from a place that we still do not know, but with time we may as well reach. The dreamlikeness is evident, but we can’t say the moments portrayed are a product of dreams: despite the hybridity of its characters, their humanity makes us question who we are at this moment, when humankind as an hegemony has lost its value. In addition to the very attractive cosmos – uncanny, perhaps – that Álvaro has been developing in his short career, we are deeply interested in his technical capacity, in the courage to delve into a language leaning towards the illustrative; the contradiction of the subject with the young mastery of his pictorial technique is mesmerising and pushes ourselves to ask about different expressive capacities of Painting.
Álvaro's work makes us think about the moments in which artists like John Currin or the later Goya faced the world. Is this painting? Is this within the canon? Is it possible that we are facing artistic delusions? Time has favoured both painters, and we are not saying that time has proven them right, precisely because Currin, Goya and Álvaro are not concerned with proving anything except the validity of their own universes. This exhibition takes us through a mystical and supernatural transit; invites us to a fantastic world where the impossible flirts with the plausible. Every face whispers stories that attract and hypnotise us. His precise technique, color, light and shape, challenge us to open our minds and let our imagination run free.
Where are we? What are we watching? Whose is that strange face?
In this exhibition we approach painting again, but this time from a strange figuration. Álvaro proposes a universe that seems to be from the future, in static and almost improbable scenarios; in his characters we understand humanity seen through the possibilities that destiny has prepared for us as species. There is a tenderness in the restlessness of these friezes that, with meticulous technique, the artist presents to us as offerings brought from a place that we still do not know, but with time we may as well reach. The dreamlikeness is evident, but we can’t say the moments portrayed are a product of dreams: despite the hybridity of its characters, their humanity makes us question who we are at this moment, when humankind as an hegemony has lost its value. In addition to the very attractive cosmos – uncanny, perhaps – that Álvaro has been developing in his short career, we are deeply interested in his technical capacity, in the courage to delve into a language leaning towards the illustrative; the contradiction of the subject with the young mastery of his pictorial technique is mesmerising and pushes ourselves to ask about different expressive capacities of Painting.
Álvaro's work makes us think about the moments in which artists like John Currin or the later Goya faced the world. Is this painting? Is this within the canon? Is it possible that we are facing artistic delusions? Time has favoured both painters, and we are not saying that time has proven them right, precisely because Currin, Goya and Álvaro are not concerned with proving anything except the validity of their own universes. This exhibition takes us through a mystical and supernatural transit; invites us to a fantastic world where the impossible flirts with the plausible. Every face whispers stories that attract and hypnotise us. His precise technique, color, light and shape, challenge us to open our minds and let our imagination run free.
Where are we? What are we watching? Whose is that strange face?