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For 40 years, he has developed his research in the pictorial and photographic field from two parallel series: “Voices of absence”, which dialogues with the neo-expressionist tradition of the 1980s and “Thinking natures”. “Thinking natures” fictional landscapes create different counterpoints with the materiality of the photographic act. A doubt accompanies the texture of the look: it is painting, photography. What we intuit are the approaches with a pulsating Atlantic forest, remnant, Brazilian. An engulfing element is present in this dialogue between the concreteness of the real and the assembling of a forest built in the atelier, from books of botany, a database, an atlas created by the artist. Their forests extrapolate language on the border of their own appearance, placing us as observers in this paradox: “they exist or do not exist, are inside or outside us”. Recent photographs, unique works, printed in mineral inkjet, on hahnemuhle paper, with intervention in acrylic by the artist, populate the show like a landscape fulguration. In these different places, a suspended nature beckons us to an image, bearer of memories that in its ineffability, beauty and enjoyment brings us closer to the paradigm of the real, that is, unverifiable, full of temporalities, fragments and latencies.

An original split as a premise of a body-image is revealed in the contours of an impure time, as resistance. In the series “Voices of an absence” paintings of large formats, they seek a dialogue with the other, near or distant. Always on the move, gestures, texts and small syntheses spread in the Via Crucis of the pigment, skin of the body and object, in their obsessions, supporting paradoxes. His drawings spread the spectator’s gaze to white, hollow borders, sleeping in his unfinished traces, where a virtual migration extends beyond his work, approaching disparate, incorporeal realities. Finally, the production of Lloret, always seeks to break the linearity of his narratives in his pictorial fabric. It seems to seek other modes of understanding, pointing to new actions and changes that are established in the discontinuities of diverse times, where their constructed images often cover different assemblies, welcoming absences and presences, symptoms that nevertheless connect in the rescue of an identity and ancestry in perpetual movement.

 

I. Carla Saudades (CS): What does it mean for you to represent nature?

Alejandro Lloret (AL): The urge that I feel while painting nature is related to a subject. It is aimed towards different orders; it is not only restricted to the act of sight.

II. CS: Could you explain to us how “the subject as the one who constructs” these landscapes is articulated?

AL: When I think about the subject (namely myself when I am painting), I don’t describe him as someone opposed to nature or the reality that at a given moment decides to capture it or document it in several different places or addresses. The execution of a landscape and its final rendering is not restricted to the copy of a place that the viewer himself can actually visit. There were moments in the history of art, both for painting and photography that, in order to legitimize themselves as art, the artists built meaning through the copy in their paintings, and the photographers by means of their photographic capture.

III. CS: Could you let us know if there is a “script” or that allows you to build or assemble your  forests?

AL: These pieces do not have a photographic shot as a starting point, made in front of a given place in nature. It is not a particular place.

Let me explain: I can even search for references in some documentation that I made from different regions of Brazil or other countries, but the final image of the painting will never address any of them. So, the “copy” will never exhaust the meaning.

In order to create my landscapes, I use books on Botany, for example. I really like the gardens designed by Burle Marx, along with other authors, photographers and artists, as well as many other sources of inspiration.

When painting, I count both on my memories of Brazil’s tropical forests or any other place I know, as well as the pictorial solutions present in the art history memorial; and I cannot forget about the daily performances of nature itself, which always surprise me with each new season. There is a mystery, a seduction behind the light. Just like any distant or near experience of the act of painting that refers to me or someone I know; therefore, it is a buildup of experiences and ideas, in the order of life, art or philosophy that reveal themselves as remains or ruins to build the artwork.

The idea of assembly (strategies in visual arts and theater at the beginning of the 20th century), although veiled in the appearance of my paintings, is a source linked to experience throughout the construction of the piece. It may happen that halfway through I need to abandon some strategies of my painting, because of a sensitive urge, appeal, or impact that the reality or the painting imposes on me. At every moment, I need to reassemble, deconstruct and build other visual forms above what I had painted.

IV. CS: Is the idea of anthropophagy pertinent for the construction of your forests?

AL: It really is. To speak in a more illustrative way, for example, the representation of a tree could start with a similarity with any model chosen, and end up swallowing the appearance of another tree or something. For example, the palm trees of my paintings are a mix of the Brazilian Imperial palm and the Cuban Royal palm, where one swallows the other. Please note; these are important icons of distant countries.

V. CS: Since you spoke about the appeal of personal as well as cultural memory, is the temporal issue important in your “pictorial work”?

AL: The act of painting happens as an experience in time and, moreover, it is grounded in us been  as time. Besides not being able to determine the moment in which a given piece is born, as I can start a painting this instant and the build-up of memories that motivate my work may have its origin on a sensitive experience that impacted me the previous week, or five, ten years ago. Therefore, there exists a temporal indetermination. In other words, there are several temporalities in play, affecting the sensitive side as well as the decisions taken on the “imagistic field” of the pieces.

In any case, I cannot determine how a work or image will be devoured anthropophagical by another future work, nor how “previous works of mine” are swallowed by a present work. As you can notice, an promiscuity operate continuously on the birth of new images.

VI. CS: This anthropophagic approach relates to your Regarding the viewer, what could you say?

AL: Let me tell you the following story that happened to me and this may be an answer to your question:

When I was doing an individual exhibition in Santo Domingo with this series of landscapes, several viewers mentioned the similarity of my work with the forests of the Dominican Republic. Some even named the places that I supposedly painted, even though I had never been to that island before. It seems that, through art, human beings experience a strange need to nourish themselves with some otherness. Couldn’t we consider this an anthropophagic experience?

VII. CS: Could you talk a little more about the temporal matter in your work?

AL: Our experience as a subject is so attached to time that I like to say, after Martin Heidegger, that our being is founded, as time itself. In other words, what we have that is most our own and original, and thus constitutes a ground for our existence is our finitude, that is, the time we have to live.

Looking at this issue in a more radical manner, I like to say: “this plot is a fabric of individual experiences over time”.

Everything we do, our decisions, pictorial strategies and counter strategies, as juxtapositions of the natural forms that may belong to distant geographies. In the landscape presented, this all moves along the territory of possibilities of experience.

Here I am not interested in the linearity of time, but in its totality. It happens based on a visual experience that encompasses different temporalities. Our perception of reality, of the world, of art, is in constant transformation. We see and we are seen by the work and existence, at every moment.

VIII. CS: Luiz Felipe Pondé defines you as the “guardian of form”. How is the matter of space elaborated in these landscapes?

AL: The decisions that structure the field of a painting favor the ground in which the spaces are assembled, and the different forms that configure the image.

In reality, the act of painting is similar to the act of storing the “memories of forms” to create a new image. It’s as if each landscape, unlike documenting, represents a specific place, were the totality of all places like a type of power, a “space of time”, built or reinvented, that emerged from the in appearance to present itself as a possibility, and bring the opening of a “thinking forest”.

My function, if there is one, is to “store this conceived and constructed nature” and offer it as a symbol to the viewer.

IX. CS: To end our conversation, could you talk a little about the importance of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest in your work?

AL: The Brazilian Atlantic Forest is something that embraces me and surpasses me. It is closer “to someone” that visits me in a sensitive experience and thoughts, preventing me from becoming a solitary witness facing the natural world.

When I observe this organic materiality, this grandiose nature that welcomes me, it becomes a cultural experience. It represents a voice that teaches me about sharing, about understanding, and responsibility with the environment, something that completes me and transcends me.

For many of us, living is a prison. The prisoner may stay in the cell for a while or eternally. The way human beings live their lives, their anguish and their weakness can make us think of a life sentence. The prisoner’s experience is the exhaustion of his ethical, aesthetic and physiological possibilities. He almost lacks air. However, in some cases, the prisoner’s condition can be transformed into the condition of the guardian of the place: another ontological quality reveals itself. What was once a cell now becomes a universe created by a God with whom we speak. The asphyxiating space is transformed into an infinite world to be represented by our voice and our hands, thus giving birth to the conditions of possibility to contemplate beauty and liberating the form previously imprisoned. I think that Alejandro Lloret’s work is a case of this transformation of the cell into the infinite of the form of beauty. The world, previously ugly and shy, multiplies in its diversity of natural forms. The environment reaches the status of art. My lungs fill with air in front of the painting.

In this sense, two main characteristics mark the work of Alejandro Lloret. The first is that his work is that of a guardian of nature’s beauty. “Chomer” (Guardian in Hebrew) is the function that God gives to Adam and Eve while they lived in paradise. Alejandro Lloret recreates the beauty of the world every time that he repeats the ancestral habit of representing this world. Born from sin, in this work we can contemplate some of the grace that gives form to the universe. Another characteristic is being a guardian of ancestry.

Many philosophers and writers already reflected on ancestry as the most essential human trait: to recognize ancestry is to recognise our soul deposited in the thought experience, be written or aesthetic over the course of the millenniums of humanity in this planet. Ancestry is a habit. The habit, together with reason and passion, determine what is human inside us. We always had the habit of representing the world pictorially. Doing this is a form of taking meaning out of the rocks and landscapes that surround us constitute our first home. To represent is to guard the form and, thereby, create meaning in this universe. From an ancestral standpoint, man is the guardian of the form of the world. Thus, creator and creature meet in the studio.

Luiz Felipe Pondé,
(Philosopher, Professor at PUC-SP, essayist, author of a weekly column in Folha Ilustrada of the Folha de São Paulo newspaper).

The poetics of Alejandro Lloret, a Cuban Brazilian artist, has as leitmotif the construction of a personal identity, through the understanding of the idea of space, whether material or mental. From hyper-realistic landscapes to informal abstractions, his work transgresses the limits of verisimilitude and, evoking organic forms, touches another issue that is fundamental to him in dealing with expatriation: time.

Coming from the Cuban artistic generation of the 1980s that transformed the panorama of visual arts in Cuba, Alejandro invests in imaginary space-time relations (exuberant, in fact). Regarding the recurrence of this doing, I like the understanding that “Thinking natures” are spaces, regardless of whether they exist, inhabit us or whether we inhabit them. I also appreciate Lloret’s suspicious belief about the experience of the beautiful in his poetics, as this being a portal to the transcendent legacy of everyday life, what “tear of the world” (or the fruit of imagination?). Especially because those natures reveal an uprooting not corresponding to the loss of contact with the real. On the contrary, like a shelter made of intelligence and beauty over a kind of ‘cardinal limbo’, they result in an awareness of the mysteries of life that the mundane reality hides.

The peculiarity of Alejandro’s work concerns his construction process. Its invoice reveals itself as a composition, whose elaboration makes the materiality of the real and the impalpability of the imaginary dialogue. Whether literal or not, his works mix a database of referring images (of books on botany and atlases, among other elements) and memories, in the manner of collages, appropriations or montages. The space-time of its forests, for example, and that of its abstractions are therefore defined in the same way. Yes, especially if we consider the materiality of the work, plus the way in which the artist relates to the world, a metaphysical outlet capable of mixing the universe of ideas and that of forms.

Inventing landscapes, giving clothes to nature, building horizons, gathering memories results in becoming, like this: from the absence of things, each place, each object, each being composes a space-time totality (“place of all places”) that presents itself as a philosophical possibility of understanding existence. The poetic doing in the capture of time is an important feature of the artist’s work.

Time itself is not divisible. It is present in everything, whether it is a place, thing or action. Only artistic creation is, therefore, capable of extracting a singular moment from the world. As something that welcomes and surpasses, “someone” who appears, aesthetically and ambiguously, between the sensitive and the intelligible, preventing the solitary witness of being in the world – the world, here understood, that completes and transcends, shelters and inhabits us, in this “de-dwelling” of mortals on earth.

Things and places are indistinctly space, just as regrets and candor reveal memories or stories … Before being mere poetic, Alejandro’s art is a means of knowledge, created from elements (animated or not) that appear to us as telluric, watery, ethereal, with added textures or hues, reminiscent of aromas, flavors or sounds, such as nostalgic summer, flamingo island, severe lazuli shadow over carmine Agri memory, deaf exile, melancholy autumn-hell … Oh! Black spring, once acute gall, today gentle to come yellow-green, light!

From fractions, cracks, lapses, writings, places, moments, looks, Alejandro’s work is a country of pictorial poetry: first dark, then halftone, finally clear flowing without a body or border. Or, when linear, it is a master symphony made of the golden spiral or life hysterogram.

The space built by the bristles of his brushes, pictorially or linearly, reminds us of a flow in time, like a rhythm. Transcendent, it confronts understanding and feeling, being, therefore, composition of beat, pause, intensity, vibration, harmony between sensitive parts: in modulation of colors and shapes, fractions and totalities.

Faced with the paradox of completeness, Alejandro seems to propose a metaphor of the space of existence in the manner of spatializing the musical experience, as explaining the dynamics of a sound wave, through volume, frequency and time. “Hearing the colors and seeing the sounds” is, therefore, a gift of nature sensitive to man, related to philosophical issues that inspire and drive artistic creation.

Here is the concept of implicit transcendence. As in the apophatic mystique that nourishes the search for understanding about being in the world, Alejandro Lloret’s work aims, according to himself, “to go beyond language, to perform in the cracks of the mystery, the unheard, the incomprehensible, the inconceivable, that is, go beyond the image, the presence, in the binomial light without light … ”.