TEAR-ing

This is a ritual: A way of connecting through paper. 

FERIA CLANDESTINA

7 seas Motel Miami, FL

December 01 – 04, 2022

FERIA CLANDESTINA

7 seas Motel Miami, FL

December 01 – 04, 2022

Alexandra Leal began her professional life studying photography in 1992. Worked until 2008 in her commercial photography studio. In 2010, she decided to leave Colombia and started a new journey of experimenting and learning new approaches, techniques, to her landscape macro photography and from then to her actual visual projects. Since then, she’s being studying, researching, and experimenting. In 2018, she completed a fine arts degree from Sorbonne University in Paris.

At the end of the summer 2017, she experienced an unexpected change of country: after two years in Morocco, she moved to live in Miami. Culturally and temporally, it was a 180-degree change; on the other hand, a grandiose subtle familiarity: her immediate universe in these two countries were gardens: intimate places where she finds the first visual similarities. Within these places that juggle between natural and artificial, it is with photography, fragments and collage, that she began to experiment and started this series of TEAR-Ing.

Photography is the basis of her experimentation, and her process includes photographic shooting, cutting photographs (using pre-drawn forms*), collage, intervention with different means, such as pastels, oils, acrylic paint, and then again, a photographic shot where intentionally oriented natural light becomes an integral part of the work. The result is again a photographic image made from fragments

This is a ritual: A way of connecting through paper. Through sound.

This is a new Universe: an explosion, movement, depth, chaos and order.

This is me: Tear-ing apart to compose again, to heal, to emerge in a different form, always integrating the past.

The purpose of my work and the intent of my life is finding the harmony within the chaos. At times I destroy by tear-ing paper apart to create again. I de-compose to compose again. I look around, I observe, I feel and in a fraction of a second I focus on a detail that takes me within and is in that dimension that I create (a diversity of cadences, rhythms, textures). I love working slowly and rhythmically with my hands: it is this flow that gives my practice the gift of fluidity as one figure continues to the next one, integrating fragments of images that give a new meaning to the colors and forms I see outside.

The act of defining the new shapes by dissolving the previous represents how everything is co-related, as the choices made, can have different outcomes, and create infinite and unique realities. I create patterns that become a version of the images I started with an intuitive and iterating approach, as each time I apply to the result of the previous forms. The interiorisation -of the act of cutting, of tear-ing, of breaking the paper randomly but following one rule: not leaving angles – suggest my need to control most of my acts.

It is because of that “regulating ego” and my unease, that it took me almost 45 years to say: I am an artist (without feeling fear, remorse, guilt). The act of tear-ing apart generates countless emotions, exploration to different whereabouts. I correlate paper with trees that “have given their lives so -we humans- can communicate through paper”. TEAR-ing paper in an almost sacred way, carefully, slowly feeling the shape that each fragment takes, as if they were leaves falling from the trees in autumn, hearing the echo of the wound trunks, transformed forever.

© Alexandra Leal