“A PLACE TO HIDE” RICARDO ALCAIDE 

 

A Place To Hide reflects on the individual's need to hide physically or mentally, shelter as form and function, themes that derive from the artist's previous works.

 

From a series of photographs of refuge architecture in the Walker Evans tradition, the artist extends his dialogue towards a psychological dimension of urban space. The disappearance of the subject, hidden behind the fragile architecture that protects him and isolates him from the city environment, structures an exhibition that focuses on the ephemeral homes of the homeless.

 

On previous occasions, Ricardo Alcaide has shown his interest in the theme of the homeless, such as in the series The sitters, a work carried out between 2002 and 2005, which presents a series of portraits of homeless Londoners photographed with their torsos naked, showing the skin marked by his experiences. Later en Outdoors, series carried out between 2006 and 2007, recovers fragments of these portraits -close-ups of the skin- that, resized on a large scale, cover the facades of large buildings occupying the spaces of billboards. This first approach to a way of dealing with architecture has a sense of continuity en A Place To Hide, an exhibition that combines the works of two different series that dialogue with complexity around the artist's interest in housing and its urban links. The house/refuge as a place of escape or isolation, but also, the place of marginalization that coexists with another architectural and human reality.

 

Part of the main works in the show is the series of small-format geometric paintings, whose forms emerge from the same photographs of the most precarious shelters, recovering their aesthetic appearance, a contradictory preciousness that misleads any origin and with references of modern architecture, characteristics present in the work of Gio Ponti, one of the architects who influenced Alcaide's work, especially in the use of color.

 

On the other hand, the second work included in the exhibition is With-Decorated Real Estate, a series of compositions_cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58 of multiple images of architecture predominantly interior and empty, uninhabited; a work carried out based on visits by the artist,  through real estate agents, to homes in the center of Sao Paulo, pretending to be interested in buying real estate as an excuse and access to these scenarios.

 

The exhibition is completed with one of the main photographs of the show, an urban image in which a geometrically shaped fence covers an area where something is hidden, a modification urban. This element, apparently alien to the landscape, is reproduced volumetrically in one of the two sculptures in the exhibition.

 

Finally, la Casa de Revista, work literally carried out with architecture magazines, ironizes the frivolity of these publications that determine trends, while its visual load based on fragments, refers to the shelter constructions themselves.