Hugo Alonso in the limbo of ambiguity

Gijon,

He trained in Fine Arts in Salamanca and Rome and since his beginnings, nearly two decades ago, his production has clearly advanced towards the heterogeneity of media: if at first Hugo Alonso’s work was basically pictorial (although linked in its roots to photography and cinema), it has progressively expanded to disciplines such as sound, video or audiovisual installation.

In any case, from the very beginning, the reflection on the verisimilitude of the worlds created by cinema remains very present in his creations: this author from Soria pays special attention to his ability to value certain aspects of reality that, otherwise have their focus, they could go unnoticed. In the words of Carlos Delgado Mayordomo, this artist works on the border between what can be appropriated, manipulated and semantically transformedand very often his processes have started from the compilation of images obtained on the Internet or in films (mostly classic, science fiction or horror) that he subsequently manipulates digitally, before taking them to the pictorial medium, this time already using traditional techniques.

We cannot consider, for these reasons, that Alonso makes his own prints of diverse origins, rather we must understand that he offers us an individual vision of a legacy focused on those spheres of everyday life that usually escape our attention and that are located on the side. sinister of our environment; that which, for reasons of our own or learned, with or without intention, we have decided not to look at, but which does not mean that it has stopped being there.

The shapes of his compositions are usually blurred and their tones are reduced to whites, grays and blacks; Furthermore, the planes have been reorganized, so that by visually entering into its images we will be entering a kind of simulation, in a complex game around the links between real motifs and their representation. His original cinematographic remakes, which, when they are not pictorial, are, as we said, moving images modified with digital resources, thus do not offer us copies of the first scenes, but rather fragmented doubles of them. They are separated by a distance that Alonso considers conducive to sheltering ghosts; a ground for questioning the past. As almost always, we can remember Walter Benjamin, who believed that Irrecoverable is any image of the past that threatens to disappear in every present moment that is not recognized as evoked in it.

It is also important that we pay attention to his treatment of light: it is one of the most meticulously cared for features in this author’s production, his tool to achieve works that, at first glance, could convey a certain coldness to the public, due to their purification and the absence or concealment of the human figure, however, they reveal to us fields of meaning, uncertainties and symbolic connotations of a psychological and emotional nature, or they transmit suggestive aesthetic games by contrasting areas of lightness and darkness.

Starting next December 20, we will have the opportunity to see sixteen of his recent paintings in different formats in what will be his third individual exhibition at Llamazares Galería (Gijón), titled “Limbo”. These are female portraits, as always elusive in him; of solitary exterior scenes that we could easily integrate into film narratives and of some astronaut immersed in the dark: again monochromatic images in a time suspended between sleep and wakefulness.

Alonso has made them for half a year, in various locations (his Madrid workshop, the countryside landscapes of Ampurdán or the arid landscapes of Lanzarote), and in them the lights are flashes, a sensation that contributes to us matching each setting to certain music and films, since that normally these works suggest movement. The gray scale implies, in the case of Alonso, more than an aesthetic option: it refers to ambiguous emotional states, between lights and shadows, and in all the pieces, with or without the obvious presence of human figures, some concern is evident; Among its possible echoes, as they are important references for this artist, we can mention the writers, let’s say they are not very fond of subtlety, Donald Ray Pollock and Bret Easton Ellis; As for music, Alonso himself composes, under the pseudonym of Lynda Blair.

These references are not explicit, but rather they favor atmospheres: they give the compositions an emotional charge, a mysterious sensation, when not threatening or oppressive. But since its first root is ambiguity, it will be the visitor who has the last word.