Artist Alan Fontes presents us with paintings that engage with at least two conceptual strands. On the one hand, we have painting treated on its own terms: grids, planarities, rhythms, repetitions. On the other, reality that is not content to display itself as an image, activating installations, exerting illusions, aggregations, summoning scenic objects, conquering space from outside itself. Painting is outside itself, this is the phrase we could utter in light of Alan's proposals.

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In two highly pregnant series, "The City," begun in 2004, and "The House," begun in 2005, Alan Fontes observes, from distinct perspectives, what makes our homes so different, paraphrasing the question posed by pop art pioneer Richard Hamilton. In "The City," Alan emphasizes the aerial view of places, towns, and blocks, allowing more specific, identifiable information to succumb to the way paints, colors, and gestures are treated. Thus, blues and grays override any possibility of specific recognition of the place. Unlike Malevich, who reduced bird's-eye views to extremely small geometries, simultaneously widening and narrowing the possibilities of modernist painting, Alan embraces the expressive character and the somewhat more documentary traces of these blocks. He approaches the photographic palette of Gerhard Richter, another painter of aerial views of cities. Thus, in Alan's city, we see urban layouts where sports courts, the gabled roofs of houses, colonial-style, or straight, as in modern layouts, serve as a grid and information in the painting at the same time. But, above all, we see the swimming pools.

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Pool blue in the history of 20th-century painting is a chapter in itself. It promoted solitude in David Hockney, narcissistic eroticism in Eric Fischl, and continues to exert intense fascination in contemporary painters. Not only the pool as delight, as jouissance, but also the imagery triggered by so many deformations of the body in the effects of light reflections, in the complexity of the mirror. In the mystery of seeing oneself reflected, the plunge is into a deeper blue.

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In New York City, Mondrian strove to connect geometry and the city, rhythmic superpositions and primary colors. One consideration is fundamental to understanding this process of abolishing geometry as an image. When asked why he repainted the white parts of the painting countless times, Mondrian responded that he needed to overcome color so that it would produce strength and not create a mere hierarchy. As we observe Alan's careful placement of minimal information on roofs, without completely removing them from the painting, leaving them expressive and geometric, we know that the lessons of presence, force, and information redefined this possibility of using geometry.

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From the series "The House," we notice the inside of the dwellings. In the painting "La Foule," titled after a song of the same name performed by Edith Piaf, we see a house outside of chronological time. Elements from different eras are incorporated: furniture with toothpick legs, mirrors like those in the dressing rooms at the Folie Bergere, photographs of modernist houses, and a poster for "Hiroshima Mon Amour," a 1959 film directed by Alain Resnais.

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In the film, war serves as a metaphor for the characters to activate polarities, victors and vanquished, while love seeks to unite opposing sides. Even though the world was morally shattered and eroded, most of the film takes place between four walls, in the embrace of a forbidden, desecrating couple. In an attempt to create the installation, the black and white of cinema invades the exhibition room with wallpaper in the same duotone that fades the color to undo the painting, enlarging it. Thus, the violet hue of love, of the dressing room walls, of the studio's invention, only occurs in the nucleus where painting is an emission of warmth, of embrace, of involvement. What makes our homes so different, we could respond to Hamilton, more than the appliances, the posters, the TV screen, is the invisible affection we bestow on the things and people with whom we choose to share them.