Alfredo Alcain. Self-portraits, 1954-2018. 17 January – 9 February 2019
Alfredo Alcain. Paintings, 2016-2018. February 14 – march 16, 2019
Alfredo Alcain, born in Madrid in 1936, it has always party in his painting of simple objects and modest, themes, those that are there to hand, to the view of all. Also the theme is well, nothing big or bombastic: the things that surround him, the traditional genres of painting, the artists have been interested. Perhaps that's why, as we recall, a number of tables included in his previous and first exhibition in Fernández-Braso in 2014 were the headlines Tidbits of life, Reminding Paul Klee... Perhaps, also, because more than the motif or theme to Alcain always interested in how I paint, the painting itself. "In my case," – he writes in the brief text of the catalog , could ensure that from the mid-sixties, I have not changed my way of painting... I do not think much, or I don't believe anything, that along your path to change your way of painting".
Alfredo Alcain, in 1954, at the age of eighteen and studying in the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando, draws the first of the twenty-seven self-portraits that the artist is going to perform in the course of his long career, including the last painted in 2018, which is also present in the first of the two exhibitions that the gallery Fernández-Braso will consecutively to the artist in these first few months of 2019.
The writer, poet and essayist, Ignacio Gómez de Liaño travels, in the introductory text of the catalog, the artistic life of Alcain and his "unique gallery painting". "Few artists have developed such a continuous work of self-reflection comparable. One might say that the painter has needed to be photographed to be sure of being, of being the one who is, and that each moment. Even more so, so radically pictorial is the personality of Alfredo Alcain that has needed to be seen-to be photographed to be recognized until the day of today, and, incidentally, to show us the way it has portrayed the evolution of its intense and varied artistic style". Because walking chronologically this gallery of self-portraits are witnessing the evolution and changes not only physically, by the artist, also to the different episodes stylistic that have been happening throughout the second half of the TWENTIETH century in Spain, from the more traditional academic formalism, naturalism, realism, symbolism, surrealism, expressionism... until other and more experimental as well as objects. The passage of time and the style is applied, changing the appearance and attitude of the artist with his own image. The seriousness and severity of the first works will naturalizándose as it merges with an element that is going to be paramount throughout his career: the humor, latent in most of his works. The irony and the game by means of which it presents, disrupts, distorts and deconstructs his portrait. The irony in the selection of objects or symbols used in the themes it represents, and the different roles she plays. These elements are the ones that contribute to the uniqueness and originality of his works, "so that the avant-garde goes hand in hand with the quaint, as he writes, Gomez de Liaño, and whose result is an image that was unforeseen by its double character of popular and highbrow".
After the exhibition devoted to the portraits made between 1954 and 2018, we will present a selection of recent work of the artist, a further step in the realization of a language that is as recognizable as a coherent, configured, lines, drawing, color, geometry, and above all, fantasy, game and ingenuity.
Alcain studied painting at the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando between 1953 and 1958; he studied Engraving and Lithography at the National School of Graphic Arts between 1957 and 1963, and Decorative Film at the National School of Cinematography between 1961 and 1964. All of them in Madrid, a city where he exhibited for the first time in 1962. Since that year, has exhibited continuously in most galleries and art centers of Spain. In 2003, he received the National Prize of Plastic Arts, and in 2010 the Prize Tomás Francisco Prieto –Casa de la Moneda, Madrid. The first time I worked with the family Fernández-Braso was in 1971, at the inaugural exhibition of the gallery-library Hopscotch in the street Guardian of Madrid. It was a collective exhibition titled "A proposition realistic", in which participated the artists Alberto Heart, Gordillo and Orcajo.
The inauguration of Paintings, 2016-2018, will open on Thursday, February 14, and will close on march 16.