Ricardo Alcaide: Displacement
The exhibition reflects how to transcend the memory of modernism and intends to rebuild the ruins and remnants through fictional construction and new compositions with architectural references.
As a continuation of moving and relocating – displacing – objects, and based on Ricardo Alcaide (b. 1967, Caracas) experiences and perceptions of how society functions and deals with industrial problems caused by modern living conditions in densely populated cities, his recent work has created different parallels through the combination of principles of modernist architecture and the precariousness that manifests itself in ordinary day to day living, while still working as a continuation of previous dialogues, from shelter for individuals to social solutions, revealing the “progress” in society as a vague and rapidly losing shape.
Living and working in Sao Paulo over the last years is an experience that still informs his practice and has been strongly influenced by architects like Gio Ponti, Carlos Raul Villanueva and Lina Bo Bardi, all of whom projected a great spirit of forward thinking and an extraordinary sense of aesthetics. Latin-American architecture, or even generally speaking, is not only as a reference for Alcaide work but also as a way of living, a day by day personal exchange that affects the way I think, I function, and interact with the world.
The work for this first solo show in Miami at Alejandra Von Hartz proposes a dialogue between all these areas observations – the balance between the formal aesthetics of modernism and the utopian impossibility – captured within the combination of found objects and the abstraction (out) from them, as in the Settlements installation: a construction built out of found disposed objects, next to a display of a small group of bronze sculptures of crushed cardboard boxes and other rejected material.
From a recent series ‘Intrusions’: a painted photograph is included; Land Of Order, an image of Brasilia’s iconographic -perfect modernism- interrupted by geometrical elements.
To complete the group of works, dismantled painted panels are the most recent, industrial paint on mdf board, they retain a memory of a disassembled shelving unit, from which all elements have been removed to reveal only the divided sections of the back wall. Here it’s the ‘action of deconstruction’ in the actual process that counts as the most relevant point for this work. An abstract recreation of construction that reveals the uncontrolled and imprecise condition to reflect about the failure of progress associated with modern aesthetics within my discourse, what could be perceived formally as an abstraction.
Perhaps the necessity to synthetize the visual elements as an aesthetic resource in Alcaide work, is almost like “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” expressed in Malevich’s Suprematism, but despite that, what lies behind are the anecdotes and symbolic shapes from today’s hard reality.
