Travesia Cuatro Madrid presents "Knife in The Water", Alexandre Estrela's first solo show at the gallery.
Alexandre Estrela’s exhibition expands spatially and temporally through different supports. Each piece is a reflection on the “image” itself as an autonomous entity that cannot be merely reduced to the field of representation. The central piece of the exhibition, entitled "Knife in the Water", is a video sculpture in which a single cable stretched in front of a projection creates a strong illusion of an invisible lens intersecting the visual stream of a strange and ambiguous object. The symbiosis between the optical image and the physical cable materializes the incongruity between the tangible and the intangible. Matter is seen as concrete while being refracted by a hypothetical change of medium.
Estrela's work examines the subject’s psychological reactions to images in its interaction with matter. Each piece has several layers to which we are initiated step by...step. The works are not just there to be watched, but rather to be unfolded. Each piece convokes synesthetic experiences, visual and sound illusions, aural and chromatic sensations that function as perceptive traps, leading the subject towards conceptual levels.
Estrela is constantly problematizing the elements that constitute the act of perceiving, splitting vision into further sensible dimensions towards the unseen and the unheard.
His work is strongly rooted in Art History and its modernist champions, while nurturing an approach to basic science, from behavioural neurosciences, to physics and acoustics, but also alchemy, science fiction, etc. Nonetheless, what essentially gives many of his works a peculiar characteristic is Estrela´s repeated use of images from nature and landscapes, and their connection with varied technology of recording and reproduction, sometimes explored to the limits of legibility and denaturation.
Recent exhibitions include, Baklite, 2017 at CAV Centro de Artes Visuais, Coimbra; Cápsulas de Silencio, 2016, Programa Fisuras, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Roda Lume, 2016, Museum of Contemporary Art of Antwerp M HKA, Belgium; Meio Concreto, 2013, at Museu Serralves in Porto; Um homem entre quatro paredes, 2013, Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo, Brazil; The Sunspot Circle, 2013 at The Flat Time House, London, UK; Alexandre Estrela: Subjective Projections, 2011, Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld, Germany; Viagem ao Meio, 2010, at Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon, Portugal among others.
The artist has also participated in numerous group shows in institutions such as: Lua Cão (along with artists Gusmao + Paiva), 2017, at ZDB Gallery Lisboa curated by Natxo Checa (travelling to the Kunstwerein Munich and la Casa Encendida in 2018); L’exposition d’un Rêve, 2017, at Gulbenkian Paris (project by Mathieu Copeland); Curar e Reparar, Anozero – Bienal de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra, 2017 (invited by Ana Luiza Teixeira); Hallucinations, a festival curated by Ben Russel for Documenta 14, Athens, 2017, etc.
Alexandre Estrela runs Oporto, a non-profit space located in Lisboa.
Entrada actualizada el el 24 ene de 2018
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