Alexandre Arrechea

9.30.2009

CAB- alexandre arrechea

alexandre arrechea
CAB, Burgos / October 2, Spain

“Arrechea has given his first museum exhibition in
Spain the open-ended title, ‘Everything Something
Nothing,’ possibly as a way of suggesting the limits
of attaining pleasure and then trying to hold onto it.
Including many new sculptures and drawings
produced for the occasion, Arrechea does not
insist on a thread of connection between the
individual works on us, but instead allows a
free-flowing set of associations to develop in the
viewer’s imagination. The most ambitious work
being presented is After the Monument, which is in
essence a wrecking ball structure whose basic
design could have been lifted from an Alexander
Calder stabile. At a height of two meters, After the
Monument does not really appear dangerous, and
the fact that the ball itself is a polished mirror
means that most viewers will find themselves
looking directly into their own reflection. Viewed as
art, of course there is an inherent fragility to a
freestanding structure that addresses so explicitly
itself to destruction, while the title suggests that life
in a post-ideological world is conspicuously lacking
in the kinds of clear-cut enemies that rigid conformity
always presupposes”

The Vanishing Perspective
Dan Cameron

Everything, Something, Nothing
October 2/ 2009 - January 17/ 2010
Opening: 08 : 00 PM
CAB de Burgos · C/ Saldaña s/n · 09003
BURGOS (Spain)
Telf. (+34) 947 256 550
www.cabdeburgos.com

5.25.2009

Alexandre Arrechea, Thessaloniki Biennale, 2009 (Greece)

Arrechea Alexandre

The work of Alexandre Arrechea is rooted in the scrutiny of power structures. The visual manifestation of this reflection is constructed as a highly aesthetic display of surreal architectures and the absurd engineering of impossible mechanical devises as if born out of the set of a science fiction B movie.
An early interest in architecture was already manifest in the works that he made as a participant in the collective Los Carpinteros /The Carpenters, of which he was part since the trio’s student days in the Cuban Art School, in the 1990s, and has developed through his solo career which began in 2003. The highly elaborate wooden sculptures that became Los Carpinteros’ trademark gave way to a more personal language that allows Arrechea to explore mechanisms of control and the silenced but lethal presence of fear and mistrust in social relations. An example of this is his emblematic sculpture El Jardín de la Desconfianza/The Garden of Mistrust (2005), a life size sculpture of a tree whose branches are equipped with foliage made of CCTV cameras that follow the passerby, recording their movements into a database.
Κeeping with this Foucaultian approach, his drawings refer to the discomfort produced by the demise of utopian social models and their authoritarian formulas by means of distorted scale and the displacement of signs from the realm of dreams to the stage of the modern city. Employing watercolor in large format drawings of buildings, bridges and other architectural typologies, he creates a theatre of the absurd, where the intellectual heritage of socialism and its consequent contradictions are at play.
His latest video, Black Sun, premiered in Thessaloniki, marries the instability of the animated image of a wrecking ball in the moment of destruction with the apparent solidity of the setting: a large wall receiving the impact of a virtual ball. Here, the work acquires a new dimension as the image is projected over one of the remaining fragments of the original Byzantine wall that surrounded the city providing protection. As if an occurrence proper of Second Life, the psychological impact provoked by this unstable marriage of support and image revives the anxiety of the inevitable failure of violence, and of the failure of power to survive its own fears.

Gabriela Salgado
2009