Statement

Artwork by Gabriel Álvarez

Although I adopt painting as the main medium of my work, I also explore other formats within the three-dimensionality. Masks, artist books and small sculptural objects, which like painting, allow me to work around a graphic and symbolic imaginary, which I take to the plane of figuration appropriating certain formal characteristics of pre-Columbian iconography to translate them into my own representations. On the other hand, the grid that is present as a compositional element in many of my pieces, become squares that allow me to develop a rhythmic harmony of a certain geometric pattern, where in each space inhabits a sign. It is not the mimetic representation of the portrayed that I seek, but the representation of concepts. It is through stripped forms and precise figurations that graphic art is shaped as one: representation and abstraction, it is a very simple form, very synthetic but above all, it communicates. The work I present here belongs to the series I made after the pandemic, having contracted covid, I began to make a series that appeared some monsters or ghosts, which I called post covid characters appear in my paintings. These monsters or ghosts symbolize everything that happened to us during the pandemic, the fears, uncertainties, reflections that appeared in that isolation.  The same is exposed for the first time. Both my own studies on color, as well as the material reconfiguration I make for the construction of each piece, allow me to play with the relationship of the images made there. The juxtaposition and superposition of different materials allows me to evade the result as a linear story. The aesthetic potential of each material used: textures, porosities, hardness and depths, add a sensory element to the work, thus emerging -and in turn- the perception of the tactile, where the work goes from being only visual to become a piece that manages to awaken the sensory capacity.