JAIRO ALFONSO
134
Watercolor pencil on paper
27.6 x 39.4
2017
164
Watercolor pencil/paper
55.1" x 78.7"
2016
BIOGRAPHY
JAIRO ALFONSO ( Havana, 1974) Lives and works in New York.
Education
1998. Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), Cubanacán, Havana.
1993. Escuela Nacional de Arte (ENA), Cubanacán, Havana.
1989. Escuela Vocacional de Arte (EVA), Güira de Melena, Havana.
Throughout my career, I have been interested in exploring material culture from an archaeological perspective, particularly the multilayered nature of objects, their history and symbolism, in paintings, sculptures, installations, videos, performances, and mixed media works on paper. More recently, I have started developing a new body of work, reflecting on the relationship we, as human beings, establish with the objects we create, use, and discard. I explore two forms of relationships: hoarding and disassembling. I address hoarding as horror vacui drawings. These works depicts accumulations of objects, devices and accessories from everyday life, piled up, and drawn closely together, so as to flood the pictorial space. Each object is represented life-size. Hoarding as clear sign of consumerism, and anxiety before economic crisis, inform this series. I pair the act of drawing with that of consuming goods, which is why I pack these metaphorical boxes with objects of every kind. The title of the works indicate the number of objects drawn in it. As for the disassembling series, I focus on a single object which function is that of offering audio or visual information (radios, cameras, tvs, etc…), and the act of dismantle it becomes an anatomic lesson of sorts, which allows the viewer to metaphorical immerse themselves into a new world composed by the history, epoch, ideology, materials and shapes hidden in this artifacts. Therefore from these works I usually extract the objects that become subjects of my videos, characterized by the use of the stop-motion animation.