"Imaginarium," an exhibition by Alejandro Plaza at Canale Diaz Art Center reveals the visual universe of a generation born in 1989.
Canale Diaz Art Center presents Alejandro Plaza, a known young artist whose iconography – a combination of neo-pop and neo-kineticism – has managed to permeate into the Venezuelan imagery. "Imaginarium" has delighted collectors and art enthusiasts since July 30th. The exhibition reveals the visual universe of a generation born in 1989, a time when the 1960´s unforgettable pop years had already converted in neo-pop in the hands of artists like Jeff Koons.
A total of 23 artworks are being showcased, including a Porsche 911 Carrera 4S luxury sport car. Plaza designed and applied the art with a load of perfection and attention to details. Using his geometric abstraction heritage, he transformed the vehicle’s body in a dynamic universe of fragmented shapes and colors generating movement on their own. Similarly, Plaza used an Essex Grand Piano EGP 183, designed by the renowned manufacturer Steinway & Sons, as his painting surface transferring all the energy of his imagination.
Throughout his career, Alejandro has had the chance to exhibit his art in different cities around the world, and at a young age, he took art courses in Denmark, where he started to discover another Disney lover, Salvador Dali, in a manner that would prove decisive in assuming the flagrant liberty of his artistic style. He has successfully exhibited his work not only in Venezuela, but also in countries such as Denmark, France, the Dominican Republic and the United States.
According to curator Adriana Herrera, Alejandro Plaza’s generation not only celebrates the influx of the mass culture that marked the burst of the first pop movement and transformed advertising into iconography worship. “It’s a generation that perhaps never read Jules Verne or Emilio Salgari and that knows Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm Brothers through the eyes of Disney’s motion pictures; it’s a generation that was shaped in the background of what Zygmunt Bauman describes as “liquid art”, in an “age of accelerated life-experiences in the ephemeral rule”. Plaza’s references vary, without categorization, from the Pokemon series to the art of Lichtenstein or Koons, melted with Dali’s surrealism and the kineticism of Cruz-Diez, Soto or Vasarely. His paintings convey this new form of virtual imagery energy and open their way –among the ocean of information – to the emergence of new identities.” The launch of his new character Agatha Mouse in Miami belongs to this aesthetic that rapidly absorbs everything and that reinvents its own world.
Plaza commits much of his time and work for the benefit of non-profit organizations that are dedicated to the care, health and well being of children. He has participated year to year with FUNDANA (The Child’s Protection Foundation) at its Annual Art Auction in Venezuela. Also, he was the only foreign artist invited to the Golden Globes Awards viewing party in Miami earlier this year, where one of his paintings was auctioned to benefit the St. Judes Children Research Hospital.
For “Imaginarium” Alejandro Plaza and Canale Diaz Art Center have combined their will and efforts in this solo show to benefit the Maestro Cares Foundation, a non-profit organization established to help homeless and neglected children in developing Latin American countries. Maestro Cares seeks to offer assistance to these children while supporting social services and other development programs.
Link to article: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/alejandro-plaza-s-imaginarium-canale-diaz-art-center/
