Alexandre Arrechea
Black Eye in Vedado, paper, 2019
UV-cured acrylic on handmade paper
38 x 26 inches
edition of 6

Alexandre Arrechea’s work explores the intersection of art and society, taking particular delight in confounding the questions of form and function posed by architecture. Arrechea’s work in mediums including sculpture, video, and installation continues to deconstruct and re-envision the visual syntax of architecture and the environment with humor and élan.

Magnolia Editions’ latest publications by Arrechea are vibrant photomontages whose constituent elements are drawn from photographs of buildings in the Cuban capital – specifically, the corners of those buildings, photographed such that the light (sunny) and dark (shadow) sides are both visible, yielding two distinct tonalities. The resulting imagery possesses a curious and provocative mixture of flatness and depth, familiarity and exoticism, abstraction and mimesis.

To create his paper ‘masks,’ Arrechea called upon Donald Farnsworth’s handmade papermaking expertise. First, large pieces of handmade paper are formed into custom shapes at Magnolia’s paper studio. These shapes are then printed using UV acrylic ink and ‘floated’ together within a frame to create a collaged composition with an unusual degree of dimensionality.

-Nick Stone