“The art is the voice of our inner scared to death. Without the spectre of death, nothing could be thought as art”.
(Andros)

Can death and life acquire sense without their symbolic, religious and metaphysical values? All the artistic searching of Alejandrina Solares has being attempting to mark out an interior course in order to think about and give out answers to the bewilderment and transience meaning of the contemporary human being, stripped of his values and ideals.

“My work was born from an urgent drive following to an emergency: everything came to light from life and that includes even the death, I’m interesting in looking into the life itself and the connection between life and death that I feel like a mistery and archetypal threats, marked out each human course, indivisible event and attempting to every our own breath”.

The death question, into its more accepted philosophic meanings has left place to the much more concrete theme of “passing away” in order to face with it and how the human behavior could be in front of it. Therefore the death meaning , is felt by the artist like a taboo, conferring to a cultural, and socio- economic changing of the contemporaneity: the loss of trust by the human being for a possible resurrection has underestimated the death meaning as such and it consequentially enforced the scare that the human being has of it. Inside Solares’s artworks, life and death theme is embodied in a whole of gestures, words, sentences and thoughts, that are changing form and create physical and mental spaces, lands which define an emotional air building, throughout an infinity progression of compositions.

Alejandrina Solares delivers to the spectator a living landscape, made up of an imaginary world of isles, mainlands, countries and thinking about places that come out from small ghost elements, creating an inner cartography, mysterious and enigmatic, that makes in evidence the life importance as a whole. The life whereof Solares talks about, is to be concerned like a “common good, in a spiritual dimension and meant as a donative love”, wherein emotions, thoughts and scares are giving back throughout blue colour that involves all her own art production. The painting image that is coming out, is the result of a supercomposition of calligraphic signs which become expression of an inner topography and therefore invisible whereabout the artist creates signed images, marked out of several pipes and network architectures that gives out to a map, a mental texture that is shown to the onlooker as a tangle. All that is in evidence into the set of artworks with the title of Ballonhandwritting Blue to be considered as a summery of a large autobiography research that at the beginning is clearly shown into the artist’s book: I’ve written more and more times I will die in 2006, marked out by using of fragile and temporary materials and wherein for the first time in appears, in a repetitive and obsessional way the phrase: “I’will die”.

Throughout the pictorial and sculptural language, Solares’s artwork wants to look into the sorrow and precariousness of the human body, explored thorugh the sofference and the torment in a emotional, relational and gravitational challenge with the support (like in the artwork: Sentinella since 2006-2013), or acting in first person by her own body inside the same pictorial support like in Blue mutation action, wherein the same artist puts in action a “performative painting”, resulted from a transferring by touching between two surfaces. In Ballonhandwritting blue, Solares has experience of different expression forms, looking into the study of the technique and the ability to create a crossed corruption of processes and procedures, using perishable pigments and availing herself as a pictorial support with no preparations.

The painting technique “ballon – hand – writting”, reveals inside the title its process being inspired by traditionl printing tecnique, the artist replaces her body to the printing machine “leaning on” an inflated and inked balloon, which surface is used as an “improbable slab”. This way, Solares uses her body (meant as form, weight and dynamics) identifying the print as “living print”: “My own willpower is really to act inside the labor physical support, like it was stroke down, impressed. I guess that my physical presence becomes part of my carried out artworks. Writing and drawing on a balloon, a round and improbable surface, approaches myself to a world idea, therefore it’s as though everytime I was creating a new world or exploring a new one. I think it’s for this reason I’ve always thought about my works as inner topographies. Along and throughout years I’ve been developing a strong interesting about cartography, maps and plots in general. By these artworks it’s like I had to find myself one’s way. I hold to be interesting that my artworks are visible and accessible when they appears overturned on the support, showing a sort of impossibility to define the whole; they are in evidence s as an enigma, a rebus, a mistery but each route is threatened, that’s why there’s always a death threat”. All Balloonhandwritting blue artworks have got a lot of common and unchanging features: the blue colour, the packaging tape, the phrase “I will die”, the signs tangle, the aluminium slab and the paper as a support, fixed on canvas.

Canvas’s surface welcomes scratches and signs which trace out a passage and takes note of her own presence: this way , the artist “takes over” the support overloading the same of her energy and recalling the epigraph technique, meant like a way imprinting memory, like an action. Another element as the brown packaging tape, creates a composition and bestows a sense as of space line that joins and separates, giving continuity among different spaces and creating links possibility among the same. All Alejandrina Solares’s artistic production is focused on the preciseness and details care, about operative choices that made her work perfectly clear and free, that teachs to feel the elements as a main part of her person and where “the body can’t be compared to the physical object but even to the artwork”.

Solares’s creative work highlights not only her consistency about her own research, but even the crosswisement by which she makes use of several techniques and supports, moving through the everlasting consciousness dimension, whereabout the observed world and the inner world are not in a dispute, but rather they appears like a simultaneous whole. Therefore the artist is more than ever “inside the artwork”; it’s a connection game between “inward” and “outward”, wherein, with the bystander complicity, she tries out and looks into her inner maps.

Text by Alejandrina Solares and Simona Merra

Alejandrina Solares was born in Dominican Republique. Came to Italy so young, she studied at Art Academy in Milan, getting in touch with several artists and teachers, that gave her a large contribution to her artistic vocation. In Europe she made a lot of professional training journeys of primary importance for her personal work research. She worked with different expressive items, belonging to painting, sculpture installation and performance, exploring and examining a deep and global theme: all life forms that assumes in its developing and organizing, through subjects which human suffering, physical pain and the precariousness of life. She attended to personal and group exhibitions of national and international importance like Carrousel du Louvre, Paris (2013); Memento Mori, at Dynamic Circuits in Milan (2014); she carried off a prize called smart city in 2013. During last years she’s been exhibiting painting artworks that inspect the death as an inseparable time event of life.

Simona Merra was born in 1981, coming from Apulia, lives and works in Rome. Graduated in Contemporary Art Curator at Sapienza University in Rome, since 2010, she is co-founder of contemporary collective art glance, a group of art historians, involved into exhibition care and into cultural set up events all around roman area, throughout site projects and community-specific, in an opening dialogue with the territory and for an heterogeneous common public. She has focused her research about last ten years contemporary art with particular reference to last generations, taking care of young artists’s exhibitions inside galleries and institutional spaces as Macro Testaccio – La Pelanda, Rome; Palazzo Lucarini Contemporary, Trevi (PG); Pastificio Cerere Foundation, Rome; Villa Croce Museum, Genoa (GE).