He used to say I looked like him. I always took this as a compliment, because beyond the vague resemblance no one even came close to Alberto Borea (Lima,1979-2020). This was true in so many ways, but especially when it came to two defining aspects of his life and his aesthetic practice: his generosity, and his love for life –a life he lived to its very limits. In Alberto (and with Alberto), art and life were always one and the same activity, one that was preferably practiced anchored by the ties of a creative community and buoyed bythe vertigo of friendship. How many times, upon visiting him in his studio afew blocks from here in New York, or dropping by his cafe in Lima, did we endup talking and drinking the whole night? Such nights would inevitably end withme helping him collect discarded stuff from the streets at dawn, our...hands andbodies tired from erasing the borders between art and life
Throughout his career, Alberto managed to maintain himself at the center of not just one but two artistic communities: the community in he forged in his native Lima inthe late 1990s, and the community of Latin American artists in New York City that he joined after moving there in 2009 –a suitable position for an inspired“10.” The legend goes that he was an outstanding “10” soccer player: the teammember who is tasked to produce the creative, inspired plays; the one who is at the heart of it all.
And Alberto was indeed at the heart of it all, as he put his heart in all he did and for all the people that knew him. In Lima, together with his generational peers –most notably from “DRAMA”, and even slightly older ones such as the ones from “La Culpable” and other groups– he was instrumental, by his uniquecapacity in multiplying and “producing spaces” out of nowhere, in bringing thecity out from the prolonged slump in which it was immersed, defying the apathyof the old, stagnated modernism which still reigned over the culture and establishing the first scaffolding of what would later become “contemporary art” and it’s new regional circuits. The legend also goes that it was Alberto,together with some friends, who founded one of the first spaces dedicated to contemporary art in Lima –in one the rooms of his mythical café, “La Máquina.”Everything has to start somewhere.
The medium that Alberto employed to modernize his artistic practice is arguably the most important avant-garde tendency to have emerged from Peru in the last century: namely, its poetic tradition. Alberto was first and foremost a poet–which is to say, someone who could see affinities where there are apparently none; someone who could find beauty in the ephemeral, capture it, and transportit to the white cube to (re)institute its aura. It was a practice that placedhim in the vicinity of a Baudelarian urban flâneur or city scavenger, for whomthe artistry of modern life consisted in reclaiming discarded materials inorder to resignify them within the gallery space. Old videotapes, discarded computer mother boards and keyboards, vacuum cleaners and even super-ubiquitous plastic grocery bags were continuously snatched by Alberto from the urban landscape and resignified in works that are still as arresting in their ordinariness as they are surprising in their careful simplicity and humor. Such was the discreet, precise magic that each of Alberto’s objects promised, and still promises today. They are laden with a level of defamiliarization that mesmerizes, pushing us to recognize the coarse beauty that traverses the fieldof our daily life.
These objects, which have now been collected and exhibited to the New York public for the first time since his untimely death in 2020, are both traces of a lifelived at the limits and tokens of the pulse of the few cities he knew intimately. They continually interrogate the spectator, speaking to perhaps themost central of Alberto’s protracted suspicions: the idea that all things canbe renewed, and might even contain their opposites –and that in this fact liesthe secret to life’s endless possibility. Alberto’s repurposing of detritus was largely an exercise in showing us how entropy can be endlessly circumvented.The point was to always be one step a head of our tendency towards fossilization, and to rebel against it. I contend that this was what he considered his fundamental task as an artist: to show us how things might be lighter, heavier, or simply different from our familiar experience of them. And he did all that without ever losing his characteristic smile because Alberto wasinfallibly funny –and if there is something that this exhibition makes profoundly clear is that, wherever he might be now, he is having the lastlaugh.
José L. Falconi.
Entrada actualizada el el 03 abr de 2024
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