bio

Alejandro Plaza (Caracas, Venezuela, 1989) submerges the viewer within the vibration and the speed of a hybrid art in which the categories that established demarcations between different cultural references in the 20th century have exploded. In his Post Neo-Pop work, these categories configure themselves into a narrative that shifts with impunity from the graphic signs of advertising posters to the genre of portraits in painting, and inserts echoes of geometric abstraction amid vertiginous fragments of multiple iconographies. Plaza appropriates the visual heritage of Disney's characters; the figures of Marilyn, Madonna, and Michael Jackson; the echoes of the Japanese television series; the perceptive effects of Venezuelan kinetic art; the references to Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein, and even Jeff Koons, among a myriad of allusions that he explores with the freedom of a generation formed within the highest paroxysm of the cultural industry.

After experimenting with pictorial techniques on canvas and board in Denmark -he developed a series on the archaic lifestyle in Greenland- on his return to Caracas he began to study illustration at the Institute of Design. One of the obsessions that have accompanied him since that time are the shadows that he does not relinquish even today when he does geometric interventions in objects such as a piano or a car. On these surfaces he designs planes with dynamic fragments and color degradations, and shadows that lend a new life to the geometric figures: "As if they were not ideal bodies but real bodies," he states. At the same time, the geometries - juxtaposed as transparencies or glazes in acrylic- started to combine with the portraits of female faces that exalt beauty stereotypes, without ceasing to have an air of their own.

Alejandro Plaza, a member of a generation born after the end of the social Utopias, creates works posterior to surrealism, pop art, and neo-Pop and kinetic art; as a way of escaping the darkness of the world, and convey his vision of a ticket to a certain imaginary of happiness. Plaza has quickly established himself as one of most vibrant and promising young talents in America, he has grown to be one of the youngest and most important artists in Venezuela with international recognition.