Alexandro Pelaez and the Magical in the Realism

1/10/19

Alexandro Pelaez: Eclectic 

Bermondsey Project Space,London 

1 - 12 October 2019

“Magical Realism” is a term typically associated with Latin American literature, where the roots of the genre took hold after the Cuban revolution of 1959, applied to a new type of writing known for its matter-of-fact portrayal of magical events. The term, an adaptation of the German “Magic Realism” (minus the -al), which had been coined in the 1920s as an alternative name for the artistic movement of “New Objectivity”, has since been variously used, in the worlds of both art and literature, often simply to refer to the magic of the day to day, and the realities that we miss as we go about our mundane tasks. Professor Matthew Strecher, an expert on the subject, defines it as “what happens when a highly-detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe”. For Venezuelan-born, London-based, award-winning analogue photographer Alexandro Pelaez, the concept has become increasingly relevant in his work over the past few years, as he has progressively developed a style of fiction, able to capture a realistic view of the modern world, simultaneously adding magical and, at times, almost unnatural, elements. 

Pelaez achieves this primarily through his use of double exposure, meaning that you at once see both a “real” picture, but also a layer of the “unreal” or dreamlike. His pictures demand close observation, so that these details and layers may be unpicked – a task which is not always possible, since his scenarios are often so persuasive – and, either way, ought not some level of fantasy always be maintained, since to unpick it entirely would destroy the magic and leave behind mere reality? Pelaez began experimenting with the process of double – and even multiple – exposures in 2008, when he was creating his Heroes & Villains series using action figures. He has continued to develop the process in more recent work. Using his LC-A Lomography film camera, he takes the first image, with no specific duration between that and the next – it might be a minute, an hour, or even a whole day. These two frames meld as one as early as at the stage of the negative. What you see there is what you get. There is no need for any superimposition or postproduction. The only postproduction work Pelaez carries out is, in fact, scanning in his chosen negatives so as to apply a little extra contrast to the colours, heightening their surreality.

This current exhibition, curated by Mara Alves, is entitled ‘Eclectic’. It draws from the Londoners series, which Pelaez has been working on since 2016, shooting almost every week, as well as from images of Chichester, Hong Kong, Miami, Rome, San Francisco, Seoul, Shanghai, Tulum, Venice, and Vietri sul Mare. The selection process, therefore, of 28 images, was no simple feat – leading, in part, to the title. Another element is the breaking down of the works into four groups – cityscapes, street environments, moving-image works of the former, and landscape details – using different sizes for the printing of each set. For Pelaez, the resonance of “eclectic” meaning “to derive from a broad range of sources” is also significant, for, although using the same method, he always seeks to capture the uniqueness of the personality of every city or subject he photographs. “Eclecticism,” adds Alves, “draws upon multiple theories, styles or ideas to absorb complementary insights into a subject – just like Alexandro’s works – often without conventions or rules dictated, but with the same combinations of multiple different approaches”. The variations in scale of the works on display invite viewers to become absorbed by the larger pieces – almost as if they were traversing the streets, or walking the parks pictured, noticing the many details and being surprised by the unexpected – while the small-scale images offer a certain tantalising intimacy, bringing the viewer in close, reminding them that this is but a photograph, something magical, not quite something real.

For each of the places Pelaez visited, there was a specific reason, be it work, holidays, or visits to family or friends. Some places he knew well, and thus he might have a vision in mind for his shoots; others were new discoveries, where he had first to take time to get to know the environment, responding more instinctively with his lens. Rome, for example, is a city he has been visiting yearly since the age of two. His image of Piazza Navona is one of his favourites, showing the typical, old Roman buildings, their colours, the extravagant fountain, and the many street artists selling their work. To get the image he had in mind, Pelaez had to shoot a roll and a half of film in 40 degrees Celsius heat. “I was going back and forth, shooting again and again, and changing the settings of the camera every time. I’m sure the tourists, the waiters – everyone – thought I was crazy!”

Another of his favourites is London in the Rain II. “London has been my home for the last 18 years,” Pelaez explains, “and when I shot this picture (as for most of the series), it was a typical cold and rainy London day. I was sitting at the front of a double-decker bus, just entering Piccadilly Circus – when I finally saw the picture developed it felt like it was a version of Gotham City! But I believe it represents itself so well that it could almost be a self-portrait of London.”

San Francisco, on the other hand, was a city new to Pelaez, and so, in this instance, he walked and walked, shooting continuously, collating potential material. “I’m a bit of a perfectionist,” he says, “so when I am in a different country, I don’t want to take any chances and not capture the image that I worked so hard on.” By the second day, however, he feels, with hindsight, that he had an idea of what he wanted; of what he saw to be the true essence of the city. Nevertheless, no matter where he is, he continues to shoot, and, from a roll of 36 images, he selects on average maybe just one or two to keep. 

It is this search to capture the “true essence” that is Pelaez’s driving force. “I want all and nothing!” says the artist, himself inspired by the likes of Ansel Adams, Peter Lindbergh, Emmanuel Lubezki and Steve McCurry. “To capture that true essence of the moment or location is what inspires me. I love energy, so if I am walking on a busy street, I need to capture that vibrant scenario. I love it when there is a crowd, traffic, movement, and rhythm as well. I believe it gives the image life and lots of energy. If I’m shooting on a beach, however, I want to capture the calm and peace of it, the magic light of the sunset, or the strong colours of the blue sky or water and their surroundings.” Again, eclecticism at play – Pelaez always tries to capture the “vibe” of the moment; what that particular and unique frame has to offer. The question one might ask, then, is whether what they offer him is the same as what they offer the viewer? For Pelaez, it doesn’t matter. He loves observing how someone approaches an image for the first time, trying to understand what is happening, being captured by a detail, and then stepping back to process the picture in full, building their private narrative. And this is perhaps the most “magical” aspect in the overarching realism – the calling into play of each individual’s power of observation and each individual’s imagination; the taking them out of reality, for however brief a moment, to an otherworldly, dreamlike – and perhaps even eclectic – place. 

Images:

Liverpool St & Brick Lane © Alexandro Pelaez

London in the rain © Alexandro Pelaez

Essay: Jane Walker

19/01/17

Digging into the Quicksands of Time: Jane Walker’s Divided Cities as a Metaphor for Civilisation’s Lack of Civilisation

‘It has become easier to divide people than to unify them, and to blind them than to give them vision.’[1]

Throughout history, nations and cities have been divided. Reasons have been various, but include race, class, politics and religion. Even today, in the so-called ‘first world’, cities such as Nicosia and Jerusalem remain riven and Rome has an independent country – the Vatican City – at its centre. In our contemporary society, divisions are proliferating – nations are becoming disunited and, witness the Brexit vote in the UK, unions torn apart.

In her recent series of paintings, Jane Walker both divides and unites, creating jigsaw-esque topographies of ‘divided cities’, with stark boundaries, but new borders: Marseilles meets London; Paris meets New York; travel is both prohibited yet made conceptually possible.

Walker has long been painting cities and professes to a strong interest in the English topographical watercolour tradition. Initially wanting to become a concert pianist, from the age of seven, and with a brief foray into the study of medicine, she went on to train at the Royal Academy Schools (1987-90), at first painting more traditional portraits, but a visit to India led her away from conventional Western figurative painting. Attracted to ornate Eastern window traceries, her own work became increasingly linear and decorative. A move to Sheffield 18 years ago then provided Walker with wide-reaching views from her studio, looking out and down across an ever-changing cityscape. She began to paint what she saw, but not quite as she saw it…

All two-dimensional art requires some form of spatial translation, be it through the use of formal techniques, such as linear perspective, creating illusory space that makes the viewer ‘see’ three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional canvas, or the more contemporary choice of choosing to play with a viewer’s visual perceptions of the world itself, subverting the figurative or landscape traditions and questioning the very language of painting. Walker, impressed by the compressed space in the work of her tutor, Sonia Lawson, sought to escape the confines of illusionistic space and mimesis. ‘The background space in my work is deliberately undefined, unanswered,’ she says. While, at first glance, her works might seem to resonate with modernist and abstract expressionist paintings – lines of emotion, vivid colours, intertwined and bouncing off one another, sparking conversations and kindling feelings – a closer look reveals a depth within her canvases, as well as recognisable figurative elements. Her artistic trick, then, is to invert what she sees so that the larger buildings are on top, weighing down on the smaller ones. Taking a slightly bleak, if realistic, view, Walker sees this as a metaphor for what is happening to cities today, whereby the pressure of increasing populations, high rents, lack of space and congestion hangs heavy. Her lines, which, on the surface, seem to hold things together, are brittle. One worries as to how much more pressure they can take.

While Walker’s linear style might be seen as an exploration into post-cubist – digital even – formal deconstruction of the pictorial space, it is arguably also an employment of Byzantine – or inverse – perspective. Walker herself describes ‘a move backwards to a fragmented medieval space’. Byzantine perspective – frequently used in the painting of icons – locates the vanishing point outside of the painting, where the viewer stands, rather than within the painting, as is the case with linear perspective. The viewer thus experiences multiple points of perspective, which has been described by the Atelier Saint-André as ‘allow[ing] the viewer a window into the Kingdom of God’.[2]

Perhaps not inappropriately, then, Walker’s paintings also call to mind medieval illuminated manuscripts. From a distance, the horizontal sequences of marks might easily be mistaken for lines of Arabic or Hebrew script. Even on knowing whence the imagery derives, one cannot help but look for hidden meaning in the calligraphy – this ‘indelible writing on the landscape’. And elements are indeed buried in these archaeological canvases and panels, for Walker works in layers, building up and sanding down, creating a palimpsest out of ghostly traces. Between the planes is a pictorial space, different from the illusion of space suggested by perspective. Aware of this scriptural similarity, Walker sometimes creates an edge to her composition, like the decorated border of a manuscript – another demarcation or boundary line, attempting, perhaps, to restrict the growth of the cities within. Metropolises abound enough.

It was a friend’s throw-away comment that the line seemed to be the most important aspect of her work, that led to Walker ridding her practice of nearly all else, focusing solely on this line – reducing her painting to its drawn – or perhaps written – essence. For more than a decade, Walker worked in watercolour, her painting becoming increasingly graphic. She sees her current style as a distillation of watercolour techniques, transferred to oil paint.

Her process begins with photographs that she takes from high vantage points – the Natwest Tower, the Empire State Building, upstairs in her studio – looking down over cities. She inversely projects these images on to her panels, canvases or papers and traces the outlines in black, simplifying and subtracting as she goes. She then builds up layers of wash, in different colours, before painting over the black lines in white. This, she sees as ‘almost like trying to write across things’, creating a photographic reversal, transcribing and translating. Layers are built using primer, often repeating the process – reprojecting, redrawing, relayering, repriming – to create a mesh of hidden worlds. With her divided cities, each section is drawn from the projection of a different city, arbitrarily partitioned, amorphously shaped. Areas are marked out atlas-like, new boundaries defined with primer. String and cotton are sometimes worked into the layers, adding further tension and divisions – every strand, every mark, demarcating, dislocating, dissevering. Vertical clefts appear when the paint drips downwards, pooling at the bottom, in contrast to the tiny buildings, collapsing under the increasing weight above them, dissolving into nothing, sinking into the quicksands of imagination, vision and time.

Colour is significant to Walker as well. Sometimes she paints ‘stripes’ across her compositions, dividing the cities still further. Contrarily, the wash on top softens their outlines, blurring the boundaries beneath. Identifying with the Northern landscape tradition, in which light is important, yet colour tends to the monochrome, Walker sees her lines as the encapsulation of light – almost as if she were drawing with rays, tracing the photograph as if it were itself a drawing. In between these lines, beneath and above, she uses complex, contrasting colours, pushing the boundaries in yet another dimension. On the surface, she often uses silver or gold, to pull out the imagery still further. Like the Sienese master, Duccio di Buoninsegna’s, Walker’s linear and decorative style maintains a lyrical note, with the use of colour creating pattern and rhythm. Depending on the angle from which you approach one of her works, the white outlines luminesce and reflect – or perhaps refract – different colours from their inner rainbows. There is an element of batik, or of scratching away at the surface to reveal what lies beneath.

Indeed, Walker describes her work as ‘trying to do something between writing and image-making’ and as ‘looking down and seeing what we’re going to leave behind’. The ruins of previous civilisations lie hidden beneath the sand, sometimes covered over and built upon, before being rediscovered and revealed. This ongoing process of defining, destroying, disguising and deciphering – humankind’s action towards its urban habitat – is metaphorically re-enacted in Walker’s work. Thus, while her compositions, overall, might seem – even seek – to divide, they most certainly do not blind. If anything, they open their viewers’ eyes to a whole new realm of possibilities and understanding, both for the past, the present and the future. If only civilisation could learn some civilisation.

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[1] Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem, Boston: Awakened Press, 2011

[2] www.atelier-st-andre.net

Images © the artist

See more of Jane's work on her website