Santiago Alcocer .- El Estado Naranja
16/Jun/2009 - 24/Jul/2009
Espacio Minimo Gallery’s current season comes to a close with SANTIAGO ALCOCER’s first solo show. El Estado Naranja – as the young artist from Madrid has titled the show – is taken for the name of the group of videos that make up the exhibition. The title references his earlier works – Los Tres Estados (El Estado Azul, el Estado Negro y El Estado Blanco) and El Estado Gris. The artist’s investigation centers around the interpretation of the different conditioning factors, be they internal or external, of our different states of mind, which can have as wide a range of nuances as a painter’s palette.
Estado Naranja is made up of 10 short audiovisual stories, created between 2007 and 2009, which represent a hypothetical reality, a place where logic does not influence the narration of events, a world where natural laws are freely interpreted, in which time and space acquire a different dimension. With these works the artist intends to bring a unique and personal universe to life. He aims to visually represent the atmosphere, the time scales and the physical spaces that make up and govern the world that is El Estado Naranja. A world that, the artist recognizes, he can at time become immersed in.
There is a main setting which all the videos share, an intimate and personal space which itself becomes a character and is conditioned by the events that occurr within it, each time relating to an aspect of the artist’s private life. Interaction come about by making use of the few scenic elements in the shot – one or two mirrors – which become a central to the story, initially performing their conventional role of reflecting a distorted image, to later become an access to another universe. Finally the artist uses them to play an illusionist trick, to create a trompe l’oeil that , far from just creating a sense of perplexity, could, in his own words, point towards a hypothesis that my mind generates to understand and make sense of the irreality that they reflect.
All ten videos are shown in two of the gallery’s spaces. Three of them – Encuadre Naranja 7, Encuadre Naranja 8 y Encuadre Naranja 11, number 10 does not exist – are projected simultaneously in the main space. The seven remaining works are played in a loop on a plasma screen downstairs.
Finally the exhibition includes three large format photographs that evoke the unsettling and disturbing world of the videos.
SANTIAGO ALCOCER (Madrid, 1983) graduated in Fine Art at Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2007. In 2008 he was selected for Circuitos by the Madrid Council and he exhibited at Galería Espacio Mínimo’s stand in ARCO_madrid 2009.
