Putting in perspective what can change one’s everyday life

by Cécile Bourne-Farrell for Arturo Hernández Alcázar, artist book, titled “Escombro”, 2014, published by the editorial house El Mojado, Paris/México.

The work of Arturo Hernández Alcázar is the partial result of unfinished operations that he develops as activating devices that intend to affect different spaces for social, political and economical exchange. His works come from a series of encounters that happen in the city, in the outskirts and its sediments, where he picks up the pieces, the remainders, archives and material, to generate temporary assemblies, precarious sculptures and unfinished collections that launch a critical announcement about today’s social context and its past echoes, establishing the idea of a collapse as the core of his aesthetical and discursive concerns.

Arturo Hernández Alcázar works between the City of Mexico, Paris, Madrid and Berlin. Among his international exhibitions the following individual projects stand out : Present is a Burning Building, Galerie Dukan, Paris, France (2013) ; Balance/Collapse, Artissima, Galerie Dukan, Turin, Italy (2012) ; No trabajes Nunca, MuAC, UNAM, Mexico City (2010). Among his group projects, En obras, Galería Nuble (2013) ; Resisting the Present, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2012) and the Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2011) ; Disponible, a kind of Mexican show , San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco and Museum of Fine Arts of Boston, USA (2011).

…….In another frame of mind, who has not admired the horror of the destruction of the twin towers in NY in Sept. 2001, which brought to the climax the symbolic destruction of the economic and political power of one world over another ? Aluminum was set in combustion and exploded without our even having had the time to understand what was happening to what seemed to us to be everlasting. Everyone has been able to experience this feeling through the film images that traveled the world over. This explosion took to pieces what appeared to belong to the order of the unalterable, thus described by philosopher Manual de Landa 2 , who evokes “Morphogenic” moments in which these semi-stable structures from the flows constitute our potentially non-linear history, always in the maling.

The work of Arturo Hernández Alcázar oscillates between existing balances and balances to reinvent. He brings into coexistence both a special relationship to the status of the construction yard and the idea that it could be the place of all possible. The construction yard is a component in an unstable balance and he refers to it “about the fact of having lived facing an empty, non-completed building, a carcase, whose structure was stripped down over the years in the Colonia Roma in Mexico City. This building looked like any building of the 90s which has burned and has been left empty. The night, only one apartment was occupied, in such a way that one would see one single light on. It was a very strange image”.

Often Arturo’s proposals are contained in archives, documents, drawings, advertisements in newspapers, sculptures, texts, collections, choreographies, shards, accumulations of materials, objects, sculptures and actions which are the result of his drifting and his diversions through the wasteland sites and the ruins of fictitious or real disaster. From construction yards to markets on the sly, Arturo hunted down during his pilgrimages in Seine Saint-Denis, construction tools, coins of the world . He assembled them in a precarious balance, as if they could counter a certain balance of the forces of attraction. As the artist says, “I think of the impacts and os the power of materials which become temporary and unexpected alliances, perversions of the meaning in aberrant formations”……

Cécile Bourne-Farrell, Sept. 2013