Hugo Alonso

Hugo Alonso works on the decoding of images using fragments ‘also of sound’ from classic horror movies in order to in a certain manner expand the painting into a resonance. Like in many contemporary artists, in Hugo Alonso the canvas is not empty to start out with, and painting is not used to produce the image, but rather it is the image that is used to produce the painting. In this sense we could extrapolate the words of Gerhard Richter about photography in order to set the relationship that Hugo Alonso has in relation to the cinema: “when I paint from a photograph conscious thought is suppressed. I don’t know what I am doing. My work is closer to the informal than to any type of realism. Photography has an abstraction of its own that is not easy to penetrate.” This semantic ambiguity projects a problem for the gaze, between the desire to see and the difficulty of discerning what is told to us and the outcome.

Alonso lets us be seduced by the uncertain, in his own words, by a “hole behind a painting that one can approach so as to peer at that which seems far off to us in a strange manner, with a disturbing familiarity.” Hugo Alonso does not just work on deconstructing the processes of accessing painting but also the logic of the cinema and its elements ‘setting, plan, set dressing’ which he reorganizes in order to show new links to fiction, to a certain extent calling up the phantasmagorical.