Alejandro Sánchez: Memory as Material, Artifice as Critique

Colombian artist Alejandro Sánchez Suárez has been selected as a guest artist for the 12th edition of the international exhibition Stills of Peace and Everyday Life, held this year in Atri, Italy, from July 5 to September 7, 2025. His participation is part of the group show Global Future, taking place in the historic cisterns and halls of the Palazzo Acquaviva, curated by Giovanna Dello Iacono and Francesco Paia.

Painting as Political Narrative

Alejandro Sánchez (Bogotá, 1981) develops much of his work through painting—not as a technical exercise, but as a critical and conceptual tool. In his pieces, the canvas becomes a space where neoliberalism, social tensions, economic inequality, and Latin America's collective memory intersect.

Sánchez's work is marked by its ability to generate layers of meaning without abandoning formal clarity. Viewers encounter materials that speak to precarity, yet also to structures symbolizing power. In that duality between fragility and symbolism, the artist offers a sharp commentary on development promises, consumer dynamics, and the impact of multinational corporations on the continent’s socio-economic landscape.

In Sánchez’s practice, domestic aesthetics and personal memory are interwoven with a pointed critique of power, consumption, and historical narratives. Working across sculpture, installation, and expanded painting, he constructs a visual poetics filled with irony and nostalgia, where ornament becomes a critical device, and artifice a means to expose the representational machinery of modernity.

In his latest series, Decorative Dialectics, Sánchez builds modular structures that reference vintage household furniture—those that once displayed inherited porcelain figurines and kitsch replicas of cultural archetypes aimed at signifying social status. Encased in blocks of resin and metal, these pieces float between evocation and stasis, questioning both their symbolic value and their place within a shared affective narrative. By reducing these forms to their bare silhouettes, Sánchez transforms them into contemporary archaeological relics—fetishes suspended in cold industrial materials that impose distance, isolation, and suspicion.

In contrast, his Phantasmagoria project takes a sharp look at color as a tool of domination. Using tartrazine—a synthetic pigment widely used in the food industry—he paints on napkins to create images resembling mid-20th-century photographs of Bogotá. At first glance, these works appear to be nostalgic records of urban progress. Upon closer inspection, however, a repetitive mountainous texture emerges, replacing the real landscape with an imposed pattern. This visual strategy denounces the symbolic and material colonization of territories by global corporations, turning color into an agent of illusion and perceptual manipulation.

Both series underscore Sánchez’s ability to turn the everyday into a semiotic battleground. His work doesn’t just revive objects and memories—it breaks them down into ideological and material layers, exposing their contradictions and inviting alternative interpretations. Between the shine of symbolic gold and the toxicity of modern polymers, between the tenderness of familial memory and sharp systemic critique, Sánchez articulates a poetics of "im-purities"—as he calls them—that becomes a powerful tool for rethinking how we inhabit, remember, and consume.
 

From Bogotá to the Palazzo Acquaviva

Set within the majestic cisterns and halls of Palazzo Acquaviva in Atri, Italy, the 12th edition of GLOBAL FUTURE—curated by Giovanna Dello Iacono and Maria Letizia Paiato—brings together seven Italian and five Colombian artists under the theme of art as a "new alphabet of relationships." The exhibition aims to foster cultural dialogue through works that link the present with the memory of the past and visions of a shared future.

Among the invited artists is Colombian Alejandro Sánchez Suárez, known for his critical and provocative approach to social, environmental, and economic issues. His work, characterized by ironic aesthetics and diverse materials, explores human fragility with introspection and precision. Sánchez Suárez brings to the exhibition a unique voice that challenges established norms and invites new possibilities. His participation highlights Latin American art’s deep engagement with today’s most pressing challenges.

New Readings of the Landscape

Through a pictorial approach that engages symbolically and sensitively with the challenges of a global future, Sánchez’s work belongs to a broader conversation about the human relationship with the environment. His art addresses themes such as time, the tension between nature and technology, and the complexities of urban life. Within this collective narrative, Sánchez Suárez offers a poetic and introspective lens that—somewhere between the abstract and the figurative—reflects on the fragility of the contemporary landscape and the urgent need to imagine new forms of coexistence.