ALEC FRANCO
REPRESENTED ARTIST
Alec Franco was born on August 7, 1972, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he currently resides. He has been a graphic designer since 1995. He began painting in 1991 and in 1993 he attended the drawing and airbrushing workshops of Ignacio Otero. His training continues in the workshops of Abstract Expressionism of Marco Otero, of Essentialism with Heriberto Zorrilla and Helena Distéfano. By 2012 he deepened his technique with Sergio Bazán and later perfected it in the clinic of Fabiana Barreda and that of María Carolina Baulo who was the curator of one of his latest samples Harena. He has been an editor together with other artists, writers, and designers of Hoornik Collection Art Magazine since 2016. He has made numerous samples between 2011 and 2017: at The Redchurch Gallery in Shoreditch, London in 2012-2013; at Stupid Perfection at the Borges Cultural Center in 2013; at the Buenos Aires Design in 2015; in the same year in the Honorable Senate of the Argentine Nation and in the Recoleta Cultural Center of Buenos Aires; the following year at the San Isidro Open Studio. The most recent: Harena, was exhibited at the Newbery Central Gallery and the Esteban Lisa Foundation in 2017.
ARTWORKS
Nova Series
The artist's works are based on time and on informal aesthetic principles that he chooses to express himself. It is through the presence of color, combined with an abstraction sometimes with tints. Expressionists and many other surrealists, where the work expands in formats and supports (acrylics, oils, pastels, charcoal, asphalt paint, synthetic enamel, on canvas, paper, wood, and steel) that transit and overlap crushing apparent figures on heterogeneous backgrounds. The work resists being framed in concepts, it goes beyond the contours and limits of the rational. It is not just a festival of colors, but a mixture and profusion of organic forms with a geometry that is not perceptible. The work generates a sensation of fluidity, of fluids, of movement. the sensation of being in a cellular space, inhabited by atoms and particles, which are in constant motion. This suggests a body space within the body. Some microorganisms and microscopic systems. It generates a sensation of Macrocosm and microcosm. Where the artist asks: are we one or are we all? Are we something unique, or individual, or are we all interconnected or interdependent? How is it that such a small universe in turn reproduces itself in everyone, thus becoming an immense massive universe? How can I understand the movement from the smallest universe to the largest universe? What makes that happen?
Lab Series
Crimson Mirror
Silencio Series
Circuito Series
Gen Series
DNA Series
Between 2018 and 2019, Franco’s work becomes more selective, the palette and shapes have been redefined and restricted. Profusion and overflow continue to inhabit the canvas but with some reflexive caution because even the logos, the word, the reason, go through the work with the writing. The rationalization of the excess represented before in the eye has now become undisguised in the writing.
Language and writing have the purpose of defining concepts, at this stage the desire to understand is glimpsed in the work, hence the appeal to the written word. The writing imbricated with the visual forms is installed in Franco’s work, the counterpoint already prefixed in previous works but now more defined: it arises between the rational order and inharmony.
Stages the fight between the wisdom of the fair word and the overflow of shapeless feelings and sensations. Red. Deoxyribonucleic Acid is a series from the same era that shows the possibility that the exact information for the functioning of any organism coexists with the enigma of creation. The writing is still present but articulated with the color, now defined, now red, vital, evoking the blood, the bleeding of the woman, the bath of birth but also the wound, the result of the stab - which evokes his works of 2011 - and the dispossession of violence.
Red, that nucleic acid that is DNA, exhibited at birth and death, in the mystery of creation and in the horror of the massacre, occupies the central place of this set of works. There, the Adn series is inserted. Molecular disorder, art
and science in conflict, creative folly and genetic precision are exhibited in the work, juxtaposed and never reconciled.
Alec Franco’s work highlights what is enigmatic in art, is not presented as a transparent window that will reflect the world as a mirror but as a personal eye that encompasses the flow of emotions and folds in the desire to understand them.
