Fernando Alday. Transitus

Villa del Arte Galleries proudly presents the works of Chilean artist Fernando Alday (Santiago, Chile, 1959) in his second solo show to be held in Barcelona. “Transitus” will open on 19 June and run until 20 July 2014. The 16 works on display reflect Alday’s re-encounter with abstraction, without abandoning his personal language composed of collected pieces of paper, objets trouvés and natural dyes inspired by the Renaissance.

Alday’s love of history along with his fascination with paper – an ephemeral material linked to the passage of time and the cycles of life – is his personal seal and has traced his entire artistic career. Through its collation of old letters, doodles from notebooks and manuscripts, his work alludes to the accumulation of information and recollections in the human memory. His most famous series, featuring maps of continents and classically-drawn human figures, serve as an invitation to recognise the traces of our history and our lives among layers of paper.

In “Transitus”, Alday’s seal acquires a new dimension and a unique voice in his return to fresh and spontaneous gestures, to streaks of colour and symbols, as journalist Pablo Meléndez-Haddad remarks:

“In this journey back to abstraction, ideas linking Alday’s work to the Pre-Columbian, to the primitive and to icons re-emerge with vigour, environments with which the artist wholly identifies”.

It is in this context that new series such as Lecturas para iniciados, the Mapa del inconsciente, and the Vaso ceremonial appear, in which Alday’s painting seems to forego real reference points in order to seek new forms, calligraphies and codes inspired by the subconscious, in which historical reminiscence and nostalgia for the past seem to give way to the world of dreams.

Fernando Alday lives and works in Barcelona, where he has received honours such as first prize in the Montcada Award and the Painting Award from the Reddis Foundation. His works have been exhibited in galleries in Santiago, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Paris and New York, and he has participated in international art fairs such as Art Taipei, Houston Fine Art Fair, Art Hamptons and Contemporary Istanbul.