Exhibition Statement of 'Social Anxiety'
It's dizzying to think how fast everything is moving forward. Junk culture bombards and forces us to consume without ever giving us the opportunity to stop and look; what is new today, tomorrow will not be, and almost everything in the digital world becomes as volatile as a simple tweet. This, inevitably, also directly concerns the art world, which is lately focused on receiving attention, going viral, maximalism, kitsch, ephemerality... that is, to satisfy the needs of an art market that has gone nuts.
'Social Anxiety', Javaloyas' new project, reveals a more intimate face of the Majorcan artist. Throughout this body of work, and through his work, he tries to clean up the excesses and unnecessary practices of this type of digital work, to generate simpler images that are based on the execution of one or two good ideas. The return to less is more, to silence, to space for reflection, to latency, to unfinished works.
We all know the capacities that the digital world and the metaverse have for art, which are becoming more and more closely linked. 'Social Anxiety' tries to generate a more holistic exhibition project, which transcends the rapid consumption of art that is usually done in the so-called digital art space, and this is done by organizing an exhibition in the metaverse, together with the other components that accompany and support the artist's new series.
The leitmotif of the collection focuses on the social anxiety disorder. SAD is an intense and persistent fear of being watched and judged by others. This fear also ends up affecting work, school and other daily activities. In Alejandro's case, it impacted his artistic production.
Overexposure to market forces in recent months had pushed him to create a work that was increasingly full, complex, noisy and flashy, when one of his commitments as an artist had always been to seek the essence, and to have an almost-minimalist approach.
This series, made up of 12 works, which will be available for sale during the current exhibition period, focuses on post-painting, digital scans and sweeps in flesh tones, anonymous hands that mislead, that demand your attention. Combined with other analog techniques, the image composition is built and defined. What is interesting to see is how Alejandro mixes and applies these techniques to create a kind of overlapping between painting, photography, collage and drawing, which results in this work that is so delicate and intimate, but also with an important aesthetic scope.
Ambiguity plays a very important role. We understand abstraction as the dissolution of any representation or figure, as well as the importance of chance during the creative process, and the subversion of the idea of abstraction becomes evident. “Social Anxiety” tries to eliminate the barrier between the physical and the digital, mixing them to such an extent that the works are not really discernible; there is an explicit desire to imitate the analogical and random aspects of contemporary painting in and through the digital world, giving another twist to the traditional concept of representation.
Suso Barciela, historian and art critic.
