Alexander Apóstol

Alexander Apóstol’s practice offers a critical analysis of the aesthetic processes of political construction in his native Venezuela. Like other artists of his generation, who began exhibiting their work in the early nineties, Apóstol has used the tools of photography and video as key elements in a critique of representation, in which the visual culture produced by power and the mass media—with their stereotypes, clichés, concealments, and propagandas—is co-opted as the raw material of contemporary art.

The impact of his work is predicated on its singular two-pronged contextualisation. On the one hand, it focuses on the way in which Western modernism, when transplanted to Venezuela, took hold as an aspirational mechanism for both the working classes and the economic elites. The rapid industrialisation that accompanied the rise of the oil-based economy ran in parallel with a national project that embraced the modern movement as a model to emulate, without questioning any of its contradictions. Apóstol works with this entire legacy not merely as a backdrop, by re-politicising its constructivist roots, but as a figure, returning to the painterly object itself, particularly colour-field painting.

The second crucial aspect concerns the ways in which political powers have helped to construct a single model of national identity for the production of subjectivity in Venezuela. Apóstol gives material consistency to the local memory displaced by the autarchic regime of the Bolivarian Republic and its divergence from History. The epic national identity that permeates the country’s contemporary era is rebuilt repeatedly across different series of works, demonstrating time and again its consequences on people’s lives.