Alejandro Campins: metaphysical spaces that provide contextual narratives
Alejandro Campins focusses mainly on painting in his practice and he relies on a deep and committed process to producing his final works. His works, sometimes taking up to a year to complete, are supported by an initial venture into getting to know the place, space or landscape he is wishing to depict. Using photography, drawings and sometimes video, he captures a place before returning to the studio to develop the photographs and make drawings. This helps to hone and synthesize the image into the essence of what the painting will be. Important themes like freedom, death, life and transience may come into Campins’ works but they are products of the natural course that the work takes. They are not selected, they are naturally formed by the space, colour, dimensions and compositions. Landscape is undeniably present. Mixed with the physicality of manmade structures, landscape is the form in which nature manifests itself. Providing a certain theatricality, it also brings about a sense of absence of the human form and instead transfers the identity of the work to the elements depicted in it.