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Alejandro Sánchez
Alejandro Sánchez arouses curiosity through his work due to the brilliant combination of the obvious and the hidden in his representations, demonstrating that symbols can be transformed to acquire a life of their own as they are reinvented.
His work insightfully denounces the social and economic changes in Latin American countries, especially Colombia. Globalization, democratization and the excessive economic growth of some nations are the causes that, according to the artist, produce alterations in our social structures. Sánchez examines free trade, privatizations and multinationals as the factors that drive the evolution of these dynamics.
This is an artist who, despite the fact that most of his works are of a sculptural nature, considers painting as his plastic language par excellence. In his work he uses pigments on different types of surfaces in order to represent different objects.
In the series Some Economies, perhaps his most representative so far, Sánchez constructs similes with metal tiles of houses on the outskirts of large cities that he exchanges and replaces with new ones. This involves several paradoxes: the fictitious full-scale simulation of an object, the fragile materiality of these tiles in contrast to the forcefulness of the image it achieves and the action that is generated to achieve its raw material that can be read from of artistic activism and that allows him to insert his work into the social context without falling into the local narrative. These containers modify the pictorial support they contain and imbue it with a new meaning. In addition to being a reflection on the dynamics of international trade and globalization, they constitute a critique of the construction of personal realities based on collective desires.
“I am interested in counterbalancing two types of economies: that of large merchants and businessmen and that of marginal communities that work for them. The materials I use to emulate the containers are those used to make the roofs of houses in the slums, such as wood and tiles. Thus, I establish an association between the roughness of the tile and the roughness of the containers.”
