FERNANDO ÁLAMO

Blood minimalism, in “Los Maestros de sushi”, Fernando Álamo continues his immersion in the world of the senses. All his work has a hypnotic visual attraction. He was excited by the sense of smell in his series of Flowers and Through Noses. To taste, in their still lifes, watermelons, cucumbers, apples, chocolates and in these pieces of raw fish. A classic genre of painting, Still Life, which is not unknown to him. Pieces of tuna or salmon on chests of drawers, ducks or chickens on tables, hares and birds, flowers and fruits have already starred in his 1993 exhibition, Natura Morte. Enduring is its affinity for seventeenth-century Netherlands still lifes, with its opulence, luxury, and sensuality.

Those who paint now are more beast, reigns red. Small format and powerful sensory impact. To accentuate his lineage with this tradition, he places large frames that he manufactures, ages and presents as cabinet paint. Frames with a design that directs the view to the center of the image that, placed in the foreground, imposes a feeling of physical and emotional proximity. For contemporary painting, the usual frame is the wall, but the work of Fernando Álamo, from his first works with La Cuadra and other theater and dance groups, usually has a scenographic component, and is sometimes exhibited as a space for interaction. Now in Los Maestros de sushi, works that are made up of framed pictures of disparate sizes. The divided self of contemporary being and its conflictive relationship with the theater of the world, with the great stage of life. Images of the mobile and vulnerable of our existence, its labile balance and its multiplicity.

It is written that television encourages forgetfulness, cinema fosters memory and painting activates sensitivity and memory. Fernando Álamo revitalizes and imposes his gesture on the aesthetics of cruelty applied by some great masters, Velázquez in his Christ, the Saturnal Goya, the Rembrandt of the flayed ox, the Gericault of the butchered body of the jellyfish, the bloody Soutine, or the Bacon of the decomposing flesh that disgusted Margaret Thatcher. Álamo is modern and traditional at the same time, his art comes as much from art history as from this morning’s walk through the market, from his sensual fantasy and from everyday life. From a painting by Dürer or from the florist where he saw an Emperor’s Wand. From a Peter Greenaway movie or from the market butcher where he is portrayed with a pig’s head. He knows that one cannot possess the immense night and the sun at the same time, but he wants to take advantage of everything, he is a predator of images.