ARCHIVE: EXHIBITORS 2009

Alejandro Naranjo / COLIBRISUR ART PROJECT

Alejandro Naranjo: No 1 from the series "Tierra Saltamontes I", Info: Oil on canvas, 120x120 cm, 2007

Alejandro Naranjo
www.colibrisur.net
> Information Colibrisur Art Project

The approach to painting and drawing and the technical elements in which my artistic work considers and bases, leave from the use of tools and means that are to me near and viable at the present time, speak of a simple search and honest of the abstractionist and lyrical image without artifices, that it investigates in the nature as object of study, conceptual technician and, the creation techniques which I have come using are: Oils, charcoals and sanginas on canvas or paper, are used like average raising the creative act going beyond a mere evident representation of nature. The oil helps me in the color atmosphere creation and the charcoals and sanginas allow to the elaboration of the line and the drawing elements that creates the sensation of structures in the pictorial composition.

I paint directly without previous sketches or too much preconceived ideas, in a way of an exercise in which each piece is the continuation of another previous one, a pictorial process to way of reflection on the format; about the painting and the drawing, on the pictorial image and the search of the lyric and the expressive, the fortuitous and concise things in my images. A capacity is demanded by means of the technique to compose the piece to the way of a performance, to way of improvisation in which as in the musical improvisation the primary sensations and basic technical elements are use; in order to propose free and spontaneous compositions, but that freedom demand from the executer the capacity to engage in a dialog with the elements that compose the artistic language.

On my painting
The painting as average expressive it plans questions of artistic type that look for to investigate about which we observed, and what of subjective way it proposes the creation of personal and subjective languages, in my work from its beginnings it was very important the search of a way to reproduce imaginative pictorial sensations and own, that although was outside inspired by real spaces or through the memory or the accomplishment of previous studies, they went by the transformation of these scenes in new images, loaded of lyricism and subjectivity. Directing to me towards an expressionist abstraction which the physical spaces become sensations of outline, line and gesture.

At the moment in which the average technicians have exceeded the capacity of graphic representation that the hand can obtain, I see the painting and the drawing like ways of artistic expression equally been worth. In my creative process, I raise an approach simple and immediate to the pure creation; without later or forced effects. In my work, as I mentions before do not exist previous sketches; development the lacking creative exercise of too much imposed previous coercions to my work and the same act to create.

In painting after a time I have been able to appreciate the value of the spontaneous thing, of I authenticate it, the concise outline and the crude matter on the support. The painting like language, game and way to express, in my case raises a way to live, of event in the daily thing, is a way but to exist to write, to say things, metaphors of the day, at night, of the landscape from my window, the wrath, the violence and the passion. Attempt to compose pieces that league together. Like moments in one melody, moments of silence, of drained, that interrupt minutes or days later when I retake the support drained and beginning to paint again in the exercise and the search of which to say with painting. In the beginnings of my artistic search, the subject of the city like weave of images, like bank of images, with its plots of line and color fed my folder of notes, in them appeared the electrical, flat cables architectonic, human figures and animals, in a familiar landscape. And they went fusing towards a way of lyrical and personal representation, towards pure elements of composition but so to speak, the line the color planes, the spying of figuration everything in the search of a way to paint spontaneous and personal.

At other moments of the process it appeared the necessity to work with found elements such as wood, wires that were gotten up to the bidimensional proposal, in the attempt of engage in a dialog mixed between painting, found sculpture and objects; in some cases on supports like wood and the walls of the exhibition site, between ephemeral and the installation. Elements that I have continued working in the way of sketches in my notebooks. Looking for to incorporate images and sensations that evoke the urban landscape of the cities of the south, with their metaphors of color and imbalance. Floods of concise, free images of pretensions of order and harmony. In another series of works I had approaches to pre-Columbian artistic expressions, in which I found ways very interesting of expressionism and creative and spontaneous technique, in addition wanting to find in these manifestations a tie of directed cultural identity towards the consolidation of an own artistic language, this series of works denominates SOUTH, and were inspired by the mud statuettes and the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures of the pre-Colombian art, mixing them with referring of the western art, elements like madonnas, and the meninas of Velasquez, Picasso and Botero, from this search pieces arose in which it tried to fuse the Latin American and western identity, as I mentions before looking for the need of an own language.

Of this series of works I emphasize two denominated pieces of great format: feminine figure and masculine figure, in which they began to arise anthropomorphic elements, like an attempt to reflect the human condition, sex; the condition of feminine and the masculine thing, the dual dad of the life, a question on the archaic thing, the monk and profane of it. Found the formal and conceptual elements in these experiences allowed me to adherer these findings to my work, and continuous being developed them in some of my compositions, or of more or less explicit way. After this comes accomplishment from series of works of small format on paper, that continues being part of the creative moment at which I am, are works of fast reflection, in which I have the materials work on the floor of the study, (so far basically paper) and beginning to work single with a general concept of which I consider must be my painting; but with the necessitude to find in the lyric abstraction of these images the composition, that communicates to me and that raises the definitive point in which abandonment this piece in individual to continue with the following one; a process in which the unfinished thing appears like result, in which the serial production by the way to work and to conceive the subject composes the artistic work.

At the beginning of year 2005 I make a díctico of technique: oil and sanginas on canvas of great denominated format call Horizon, appears like a landscape desolate generated by color atmospheres and in which anthropomorphic figures are drawn of concise way which seem to be in an exodus through this territory, in which these beings represent indefinite moments of the human existence, of the war; of the human drama of my country and the contemporary world. My work is inner really landscape, the glance that it looks for, the outline that it invites to watch and to be watched, is the archaic thing, the erotic, the monk and the ordinary. The violent and poetic rate of the nature, the urban thing, the savage, fleeting, of which it is symbolic and it investigates in the interior, which means through a veil, is a game and a reflection, is writing, is painting, is drawing.