ARTNEXUS/ALAN FONTES - POR ALESSANDRA SIMÕES
Artist Alan Fontes' (Minas Gerais, Brazil) insistence on repeatedly addressing a single theme—"the house"—has shaped his work into an interesting and complex aesthetic interplay. The exhibition recently presented at Galeria Laura Marsiaj in Rio de Janeiro demonstrates that fidelity to this aesthetic project has elevated his work to a level of powerful poetic impact.
In the installation La Foule (The Multitude), part of the series of paintings entitled Sweet Lands, Fontes once again returns to the theme of the house as a backdrop for a meaningful reflection on the contemporary human condition. One of the most recurring resources in Fontes' work is metalanguage. These paintings and installations address the very theme of representation; images that represent images. For example, many of his paintings use photographs to incorporate images of walls that belong to houses—among them, his own.
This technique is also present in La Foule, a work inspired by Édith Piaf's song of the same name, which narrates, through metaphors, a brief romantic affair amidst a crowd at a party. In this installation, Fontes reproduces a small room painted in shades of gray, where he places everyday objects painted white, such as bottles, chairs, and rugs. A large, colorful acrylic canvas is placed on one of the walls of these "houses," simulating the continuation of the room: furniture, a TV, and several photographs.
This creates an enigmatic interplay between two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces, functioning as a visual metaphor for the relationship between the real and the imaginary. The environment seems to retain traces of the intimacy of the couple described in Piaf's song. Through the painted photographs, complemented by absurd scenes—such as a couple lying on a bed on a deserted beach, or a house on fire—the images function as fragments of the narrative. The effect of uncertainty is reflected in the viewer's feeling that the characters in the song once lived there and abandoned the place as if it were an empty stage.
The reflection based on intimate circumstances, present in La Foule, is completely absent in Sweet Lands. It consists of two series of realist paintings that simulate aerial photographs: "Casa," with images of isolated houses, and "City," with rooftops of residential areas. Although Fontes states that the "Casa" series deals with "portraits of individual desires, affective micro-landscapes," his images reveal a pasteurized aesthetic of a certain trend in contemporary architecture, whose projects lack cultural identity; they are symbols of the exhaustion of human interaction in large urban centers.
These encaustic paintings produce a strangely flat—and therefore unreal—light. They are reminiscent of the work of Edward Hopper (1882–1967), especially his domestic scenes that evoke the feeling of loneliness in modern American society. They also evoke themes such as solitude, emptiness, and the immobility of urban life, present in some works by British artist David Hockney, with their metaphysical environments—for example, images of empty sofas or the water barely stirred after someone jumps into a pool.
The home has been a central theme in Fontes's work for some years, especially homes in large urban centers, as shown in the works entitled "Kitnet" (kitchenette). In Brazil, the term refers to small apartments, usually with only one room. Fontes depicts prosaic environments, with solitary characters or completely devoid of human presence. These are bathrooms, living rooms, bedrooms with only furniture, objects, and portraits hanging on the walls, the only traces of life.
Why are so many portraits of the artist himself present in the images? It's yet another indication of the complex puzzle that makes up his body of work, which denies the classical aesthetic principle of art as a representation of the world. The notion of art as an object in itself is clearly present in several of Fontes's works, which are, after all, images upon other images.
Fontes uses a typically postmodern language, permeated by pastiches and symbols of contemporary times: irony, chaos, self-reference, and the meaningless. Above all, Fontes found an ideal territory—the home—to reflect on the existential dilemmas of urban society. Beneath the idea of the home—the most trivial of human symbols—lies humanity's assault to materialize the world and achieve its own isolation. Alan Fontes proposes a profound experience of everyday life against the solitude dictated by our social values.