This piece for the Shelter Foundation is one of the artist’s works of “repetition”; here, a lithograph of a random, painterly motif is presented as two identical sheets side by side. What seem to be “accidental” traces of color rest on earlier color layers. By showing the motif pairwise, the coincidental and the intentional take on equal importance. What appears to be haphazard is potentiated and demands concerted contemplation. But more than this, the viewers become the artist’s accomplices, being expected to determine how exactly the sheets should be hung.
Alfredo Álvarez Plágaro (*1960, Victoria, Spain; now in Madrid)
Alfredo Álvarez Plágaro belongs to Spain’s newer generation of contemporary artists. The first of his Cuadros Iguales, or Identical Paintings from the 1980’s marked as a central theme of his work the idea of repetition.
Identical, colorfully hued canvas objects are rowed in parallel and allow for new and always variable wall installations. According to Plágaro, the process of continually adding more to the (nearly) same can liberate the artist, but it also shifts the levels of meaning of what is painted. In 1992, in a Dadaistic manner he opened two exhibitions simultaneously, one in the Gallery Angel Romero and one in the Gallery Edurne, calling these Dos exhibitiones idénticas (Two Identical Exhibitions.)
