The Ubiquity of the Image
By Nelson Herrera Ysla
When one observes Alejandro García working with flat images, diverse materials, the space around him, the immediate or distant memory, the memories piled up in his head, and other elements impossible to name them all, I am suddenly assaulted by those documentaries where Jackson Pollock appears releasing streams of paint with a brush onto a canvas placed on the floor or Ives Klein painting semi-short women’s bodies, I am suddenly assaulted by those documentaries where Jackson Pollock appears spraying paint with a brush onto the canvas placed on the floor or Ives Klein painting bodies of half-naked women to print on nearby walls and canvases, among so many other self-absorbed creators, living their works from within, without caring about the vision that some privileged viewers might glean from such visions.
It is the surprise that comes, one after another, when it comes to initial impulses, starting only from an idea not fully defined but barely sketched, imagined, dreamed in the vertigo of the night while one is resting; tired of walking the streets discovering signs and symbols of the material and spiritual life that surrounds us. This is what Alejandro does in his daily routine. Here and there, he finds deformed and useless objects, remains of signs and words that remind him of past stories, ready to be reborn in his imagination and in his hands. He places them in corners that are not always organized or in archives that chance and amazement are in charge of finding them and bringing them out into the light of day, ready to be part of an act of creation that has components of reality and of the intangible, of the impossible to define.
From this movement between the dreamed, thought and lived, sketches emerge that begin to take on meaning and reality on paper, canvas and objects, although we cannot truly clarify their birth because they merge, juxtapose, mix, clinging to the new that emerges until they consolidate into a specific form or into rugged morphologies that creators and critics call works of art, symbolic production, proposals of connoted aestheticism. They emerge and submerge again and again, like those waves of the sea that come and go tirelessly without us being able to specify what they really are, why they are always there, at any time of the day and night without asking permission, without asking for anything in return except their permanent and eternal flow.
Nothing clear, nothing perfect, but sufficiently credible, because we feel their dimensions, colors, textures, smell, sparkle… when they become works of art. That is what we feel in one way or another, before the magnitudes of Alejandro García’s works, which do not express a certain beginning or end, a rational structure, an apparent logic: they are expressions of the unknown, of the unpublished, of the unknown that underlies our memory and bursts in when we least expect it. It is creation in its pure state, far from precision instruments, from preconceived ideas. It is the wild flowering that we find in the forest without the intervention of the hand of man.
Since he began as a painter, engraver, and creator of unclassifiable objects, this artist erased the boundaries between the expressions of visuality and opened paths little explored by others. Both painting and engraving expanded in small and large formats, and he opened the doors to nature to be part of his creative processes. He placed painted canvases on the roof of his house, so that the outdoors could collaborate in the completion of the works: the air, the rain, the birds and even the saltpeter of the sea were mixed with oil and charcoal, with silkscreen printed on cardboard or canvas. Allied with him, nature offered him new textures and other chromatic dimensions that he intuited without prejudice: an open work, as Umberto Eco would have said, an unfinished work in short, because some time later, humidity and temperature changes would continue the work he had begun.
This is none other than one of the facets of the expansion of creation and art. A face that is the product of audacity and nonchalance, of irreverence in this era where images reign and assault us day after day, creating a sort of monopoly, of an unfathomable empire that is impossible to evade. The image inhabits all the culture created by man, just like the verb, considered the first expression of man on Earth. The image surrounds us and embraces every human condition. We see more images every day than we thought… and we read less. Images compete to occupy the largest space of knowledge, although they have a hard time because we think (still) with words and not with images.
Alejandro is a devotee of both instances of knowledge, he moves from one to the other at unforeseen speeds and with them he travels through immense territories of culture. He exhibits his creation adjusting to the exhibition space, because no previous idea satisfies him to reach that privileged state where the free spirit, the nonconformist soul, the art in process of expansion, organizes and displays his works on walls, on the floor, on the ceiling or on any surface because his works are worth by themselves.


