JAIRO ALFONSO
HAVANA, 1974
Jairo Alfonso (Havana) is a Cuban artist living and working in New York. He is a graduate of the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana. Throughout his career, Alfonso has been interested in exploring contemporary material culture from an archaeological perspective, particularly the complex nature of objects, their history and symbolism through diverse media such as painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and video. Recently he has developed a body of work, in which he reflects on the relationships we as human beings establish with the objects we create, use and discard. The artist explores two types of relationships: accumulation and disassembly.
The artist approaches the theme of accumulation through “horror vacui” drawings that result in agglomerations of objects, devices and accessories of daily life, stacked and drawn next to each other, until they fill the pictorial space. Each object is represented according to its actual size. These drawings are inspired by the consumerist obsession of contemporary life. They establish an analogy between consumption and the action of drawing (as another way of consuming) the object referents with which it relates, which is why he creates these “boxes” with objects of all kinds. The title of the works is the total number of elements represented in them. As for the series of disassemblies, the artist in each work focuses on a single object whose function is to provide audio and/or visual information (radios, cameras, televisions, etc….). The act of disassembling them becomes a kind of anatomical dissection that allows the receiver to immerse himself in the symbolic universe of these artifacts, composed of history, time, ideology, materials and forms contained in them. Subsequently, some of these dissected objects culminate in videos made from the use of the stop-motion technique.
Alfonso has participated in more than ten solo exhibitions around the world and in more than 60 group exhibitions. His works have been part of important exhibitions such as Useless: Machines for Dreaming, Thinking and Seeing at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2019); A sense of Place. Selections from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection at Mana Wynwood Convention Center, Miami (2015); Flow: Economies of the Look and Creativity in Contemporary Art from the Caribbean, Washington DC (2014); Cuban America: An Empire State of Mind, Lehmann College Art Gallery, New York (2014); Occupying, Building, Thinking: Poetic and Discursive Perspectives on Contemporary Cuban Video Art (1990-2010), Museum of Contemporary Art (USF) Tampa (2013); Politics: I don’t like it, but it likes me, Laznia Center for Contemporary Art, Gdanks (2013); Batiscafo/ Proyecto Circo. 8 Bienal do Mercosul. Ensaios de Geopoética, Porto Alegre (2011) among others. She has participated in several artist residencies such as The Fountainhead Residency, Miami (2019), Marble House Project, Vermont (2015) and Guttenberg Arts, New Jersey (2014). She also received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2017). His work is part of public and private collections such as the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles; the Permanent Collection of the Province of Hainaut, Belgium; the Havana Galerie Collection, Zürich, among others. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
