Jóvenes Poéticas Surrealistas
June 4 September 28, 2008
The show, based on drawings and collages, occupies the areas assigned to both series in the Granell Foundation building called Palacio de Bendaña.
The INSITU space is designed to host projects featuring a specific intervention in a certain area within the museum.
The Jóvenes Poéticas Surrealistas section was created with the objective of holding individual exhibitions by up-and-coming artists that reinterpret, to a certain extent, the surrealist movements aesthetic and ethical legacy.
As a new feature the year, artists are being given the opportunity to occupy the rooms assigned to both series of exhibitions, since their work in particular both explores surrealism and enables specific projects to be carried out in the peculiar space of the Granell Museum. Delicias de lo grotesco, Aldo Alcotas first individual exhibition in Spain, is centred on two different exhibition formats: a conventional one, made up of a series of around thirty works, featuring a variety of techniques on paper, and a specific intervention project, assigned for this purpose, by means of illustrations and collages.
In the space set aside for the specific project, after undertaking the customary spatial study that such projects require, the drawing is generated spontaneously, annexing spaces on the floor and in the canvases on the wall of the exhibition area. The drawing leaves the constrictive setting, invades the spectators perceptive space and gives the artist an opportunity for self-ridicule regarding the traditional exhibition format, also used in this exhibition and consisting of two-dimensional works correctly framed and hung on the wall.
Aldo Alcotas work on paper contains the seed of questioning the work of arts conventional techniques and media: the artist uses a well-defined and well-composed work to create visual trompe loeils that do not enable us to distinguish the brushstroke, automatically identified with the drawing, in the part of the collage; he also intervenes in the base medium to carry out the plastic action, i.e. the paper, by adding flat objects that can serve as a line, even sometimes sewing the papers surface. The line, the silhouette, the essentialisation of the form, in short, the drawing, constitutes the main mechanism of expression in this young artists work.
The work on display in the Granell Foundation reflects aesthetics taken directly from the subconscious with a creative process based on psychic automatism fresh, amusing and urban, indebted to the contemporary forms of the comic and the illustration. Alcotas work is full of fictional beings that generate undetermined spaces, with a constantly mutating identity; they are grotesque, hybrids, and were created by combining other fictional beings taken from a variety of cartoons and illustrations.
Alcota does not only create a new imaginary ethnic group but also endows it with a language generated by means of a collage of real symbols. With all of this he creates a kind of vignettes, in which his grotesque characters appear without communicating with each other, without generating a story; these are pure presence, poetical testimony, and an exact copy, in the artists eyes, of todays globalised world.
