Alan Fontes is a painter of three-dimensional space. Not only because he represents a space that unfolds within the canvas, as in the traditional image of painting as a window to the world. But because the artist transforms the world into painting. It's as if we were inside the painting, just as it is completely outside itself.

 

This procedure doesn't signify a definitive abandonment of the canvas or the plane, nor an attempt to save painting from an end that never came. On the contrary, it is the fruit of both a freedom afforded by the present and an achievement of the artist. Some of his canvases feature a plane discontinuous in relation to the background, as if detached from the whole, yet within it. They are paintings of reflections on glass surfaces or of building elements. While some works investigate architecture and utopia, others depict ruins. The series of destroyed houses, created from images of cities that have experienced earthquakes, symbolizes more than a human tragedy; it symbolizes the collapse of an ideology.

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There are paintings in which the artist uses aerial images, distant from the space experienced by the body. The flattening of the topography and the terrain's features might seem at odds with works where the horizon is visible. However, the aerial view presupposes an experience mediated by technological devices such as GPS, just as preexisting images taken from magazines and the internet serve as references for houses and landscapes. In any case, it seems to be through the image that the relationship with the world becomes possible.

 

Alan Fontes' painting is not content with physical limits. It literally falls off the canvas, as when bottles fly to the floor. The scenography is also the work. The interior of the room blends with the painting. Gray wallpaper turns pink on the canvas. What should be a backdrop becomes the protagonist. In this work, the entire environment references films in which the bonds between couples are dissolved. The painted objects that appear outside the canvases create an experience that's the opposite of Van Gogh's painting in Akira Kurasawa's film Dreams.

 

Architecture and ideas in ruins, broken personal relationships, and images replacing physical contact are signs of dystopia. Since the continuity between what occurs inside and outside Alan Fontes' paintings isn't achieved solely through the use of perspective, his works convert the space we inhabit into fiction. And his evident technical skill tends to be camouflaged by his sarcasm and self-irony.