artnexus #53

Since the 1990s, Alexander Apóstol (Barquisimeto, Venezuela, 1969)1 has explored the potential of photography for an investigation of the body, memory, and identity. Using humor and irony, he created portraits that dealt with varied everyday situations. His 1995-1997 series Pasatiempos and Sopa de Letras, are a satire of the image of the hero. In Las siete diferencias, Apóstol situates himself in the kitchen to analyze the relationship between masculinity and femininity. With Las siete semejanzas he creates a space of ambiguity. 

His eight-photography 2003 work What I’m looking for won the 6th Young Artists with FIA Salon. In it Apóstol worked on recreating the imaginary of five Latin youths whose faces are hidden, and who fantasized about Man and landscape on the Internet. 

Apóstol’s more recent works,  caracas Suite and Residente Pulido. Ranchos (2003-2004), won one of the awards given at the recent Cuenca Biennial. In the first one, he makes a journey through paradigmatic buildings, which he appropriates and re-structures from the perspective of the social changes in Venezuela. The questions raised by the artist revolve around the fragility of the dreams that drive such construction projects, which in their time were seen as symbols of progress that today is difficult to visualize. The six photographs of Residente Pulido. Ranchos explore the giant neighborhoods where a significant part of the city’s population congregated in the decades of the economic boom (1950-1960). Apóstol says: “Those buildings, erected under totally spontaneous parameters and according to the immediate needs of their designer/builder, follow a modernist tradition in their structure and their formal postulates, just as much as the more official buildings in the city’s formal valley do."2 Little is left of the utopia that articulated them.

NOTES

1. ArtNexus No.19 (1996) includes an article on Alexander Apóstol.

2. Referential text sent by the artist to ArtNexus on the occasion of this publication. See the article on the Cuenca Biennial.

IVONNE PINI