Profil
Work by Gabriel Álvarez
Although I adopt painting as the main medium of my work, I also explore other formats within three-dimensionality.
Masks, artist's books and small sculptural objects, which, like painting, allow me to work around a graphic and symbolic imaginary, which I take to the level of figuration, appropriating certain formal characteristics of pre-Columbian iconography to translate them into my works. own representations.
For its part, the grid that is present as a compositional element in many of my pieces, become boxes that allow me to develop a rhythmic harmony of a specific geometric plot, where a sign lives in each space. It is not the mimetic representation of what is portrayed that I am looking for, but the representation of concepts.
It is through stripped-down forms and precise figurations that graphics are formed as one: representation and abstraction, it is a very simple form, very synthetic but that above all things, communicates.
The work that I present belongs to the series that I made after the pandemic, having contracted covid, I began to make a series in which monsters or ghosts appeared, which I call post-covid characters that appear in my paintings. These monsters or ghosts symbolize to me everything that happened to us during the pandemic, the fears, uncertainties, reflections that appeared in that isolation. It is exhibited for the first time.
Both my own studies on color, as well as the material reconfiguration that I carry out for the construction of each piece, allow me to play with the relationship of the images created there. The juxtaposition and superposition of different materials allows us to avoid the result as a linear story.
The aesthetic potential of each materiality 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 solely visual to becoming a piece which also awakens the sensory capacity.