Artist: Ricardo Alcaide
Displacement
November 20, 2014 – February 5, 2015
Alejandra von Hartz Gallery
Miami, FL, USA
Displacement: The act of displacing, or the state of being displaced; a putting out of place.
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 my experiences and perceptions of how society functions and deals with industrial problems caused by modern living conditions in densely populated cities, my 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—and after more than a decade in London, and previously in my hometown of Caracas— is an experience that still informs my practice and has been strongly influenced by architects like Gio Ponti, Carlos Raul Villanueva and Lina Bo Bardi, for example, all of whom projected a great spirit of forward thinking and an extraordinary sense of aesthetics—something that I cannot avoid to express myself. Latin-American architecture, or even generally speaking, is not only as a reference for my 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 —once again— 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 my 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.
Ricardo Alcaide
November 2014
Ricardo Alcaide was born in Caracas in 1967. He currently lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. Recent exhibitions include: Settlements, Baro galeria, São Paulo; The Language Of Human Consciousness, Athr gallery, Jeddah. Saudi Arabia; Donde Hay Protesta Hay Negocio, Galería Agustina Ferreyra, San Juan de Puerto Rico (2014); Solo Project, Curated by Jose Roca. Pinta NY Art Fair, New York; Incidental Geometry, Project Room – Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York; Visão Do Paraiso: Pensamento Selvagem, curated by Julieta Gonzalez and Pablo Leon de la Barra, Rio de Janeiro; From Disruption To Abstraction, New Art Projects Gallery, London (2013); Prototipo Vernacular, Oficina #1, Caracas, Venezuela; Optimismo Radical, Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York (2012). His work is part of the following collections: Sayago & Pardon, Los Angeles, CA. LIMAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima, Zabludowicz Collection. London. Colección Fundación Cisneros, Caracas. Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas.