Painters Painting Paintings
Painters Painting Paintings/Oostmeijer Residency, Amsterdam, NL
In residence Summer 2022
“The side of a thigh, a flexed hand, the crook of a knee, a wrinkled palm, a dark tendril of hair: the close, cropped framing of Alejandra Moros’ paintings feels intimate and uncomfortable – unsure if we’re meant to be looking, and at what. Yet, their luminous surface; drenched in a bright, glistening light seems to invite us in, as if lit up for the stage and consenting to our fixed stare.
As the third participating artist on the PPP/Oostmeijer residency in Amsterdam, Ale found herself alone in a foreign city during the height of the summer. While previously looking to close friends and family members as the subject for her portraits back at home in Miami; this period of solitude forced a self-reflection, as she turned to her own body as the object of study.
Beginning her process with experimental images and videos, Alejandra has an ongoing relationship with photography. Capturing herself in her studio, she moves her limbs through different positions and movements – revisiting them later through crops and closely zoomed edits. Ale notes the artist Moyra Davey’s musings on photography in her book, Index Cards, as influential to this particular body of work. While Davey explores the relationship between photography and writing, Alejandra is exploring the relationship between photography and painting. We see the photographic techniques of cropping, enlarging and zooming being applied to her paintings; filling the canvas with increasingly abstract compositions of bodily fragments.
While Alejandra’s skilful blending renders the paintings almost photographic, her use of monochromatic colour undermines their realism. Lustrous hues of green, yellow, orange and pink cast over her paintings, likening these sites of wrinkled skin to candied fruits or petaled flowers. The works share a similar ambiguity with the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, famously known for her abstracted formations of flowers. While O’Keeffe’s paintings were interpreted as euphemistic depictions of female genitalia, a suggestion the artist continuously denied, Alejandra’s paintings feel more overtly provocative. Clothing is notably absent, and intimate moments of touch are given central focus. In Stomach, Side, the sensation of touch is heightened through the impression left by fingers on spongy pink surface, forming creases and folds that radiate from the site of contact.
The texture in Catch, Release (diptych) is similarly palpable, the delicate yellow grooves resembling the detail of a sliced sweet pepper. Alejandra’s attention to surface can be likened to the traditions of Dutch still life paintings that hang in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Executed with the same precision and intricacy, Alejandra lists Willem Kalf’s Still Life with a Silver Ewer as an artistic reference. Kalf’s detailing of each bump and bulge on a lemon rind is as pronounced as Alejandra’s microscopic pores, highlighted by a similarly stark and illuminating light.
Alejandra’s paintings are vulnerable and enigmatic, curious and suggestive. Comfortable with their resistance to recognition, the works are generous invitations into one’s intimate experience of corporeality; forcing us to reckon with what we think we see and accept that we might never be sure.“
Written by Anna Eaves
