Rafael Alonso

Niterói, 1983. Lives in Rio de Janeiro

Used wooden stools; chairs by a well-known designer; acrylic sheets; cotton shirts; Eucatex; fiberboard or scrap wood; sticky tape; plywood, all of these go into Rafael Alonso’s “canvases” or surfaces. Materials of everyday use known for their simplicity or rusticity tension the “nobility” of the museum, gallery, or art-fair wall they are destined for, profaning a certain sanctity and fetishism involved in the ways of exhibiting art.

At Frestas, Alonso presents an installation made up of forty paintings. Rendered in primary or secondary colors, black-and-white, neon, or in retro-futurist dark shades, these paintings avail of rounded forms and concentric repetitions; patterns, lines, overlappings and effects reminiscent of op-art or concrete art, as well as arabesques and gradients that look like they’ve been stenciled or left unfinished.

[U.C.]