ALEJANDRO CARDENAS

Executed during the Los Angeles’ dual crises of the Covid-19 pandemic and the wildfires, the new paintings and sculptures produced by Cardenas provide a vision of a post-human world wherein the relationship between human-forms and the environment is one of unity and coexistence. Guided by his own imagination and inspired by a wide variety of influences ranging from Surrealism, to Sci-Fi, to magical realism, Cardenas immersed himself in the creation of surreal post-human scenes of polished gridded interiors populated by eerie angular figures. In his unique approach to figuration, Cardenas’s signature humanoids of narrow wire-frame silhouettes wrapped in colourful patterns of zigzagging lines, lie, sit, or stand relaxedly in minimal architectural environments. Unlike us, these faceless humanoids appear to lack all sensory organs, yet they are not deprived of their sensorial ability. Instead, they convey emotion through body language, resulting in a wide variety of suggested emotional expression. The vigorous living forms contained within these interior spaces contrasts to the decaying outdoor world seen through the large windows in some of the paintings, where the streaming sunlight takes on an orange glow—similar to the colour that the sky took outside Cardenas’s studio during the wildfires.

The subject matter of the grid, a reference to Superstudio’s, iconic Ill Monumento Continuo, utilised in the late 1960s by the group of radical architects from Florence to address the homogenising effect of globalisation, is consistent throughout the exhibition. In the paintings on view here, Cardenas uses the grid as the only defining element of the architectural space inhabited by his figures. Just like Superstudio’s anonymous megastructure, it is a post-architectural space, a non-space that has been stripped away of any vestige of history and design, with the exception of a few prototypes of iconic chairs, designed by the artist. As Cardenas explained of his idea for the show, ‘It is about the present moment and the choices we have to make in order to exist as a culture in a world we are destroying and which we have to start fixing. I feel that our survival as a species depends on an agreement among all of us, a kind of unification of ideas, a non-space wherein everything this is possible. The grid, to me, is representative of that possibility.’ The other recurrent element that unites the paintings and the sculptures is the sinuous silhouette of a snake, which is portrayed full-bodied in the two aquamarine lacquered aluminium sculptures, and also appears in some of the paintings, albeit in fragments and with black and blue cross-banding. Inspired in Nehebkau, the primordial snake god of ancient Egyptian mythology originally considered an evil spirit and later a benevolent god associated with the afterlife, the snake here symbolises the often-conflicting impulses at the core of the human experience and throughout history. Taken as a whole, the exhibition explores the power of storytelling and of art as transmutation of experience.

Rosario Güiraldes, Assistant Curator at The Drawing Center. Courtesy Almine Rech.