Alejandro Vidal represented by Galerie Adler

Alejandro Vidal - Texts

Alejandro Vidal

Social conflict, self-defence, violence, activism and illegality are among the issues explored in Alejandro Vidal works. His practice involves several mediums such as photography, drawing, video and installation. Vidal examines a global situation where new complexities are creating a social, economical and political new panorama.

Alejandro Vidal investigates, with a critical distance, positions prior to the act of violence. From self-defence techniques to 80`s punk, early rave techno or 90’s cult movies to breakdance or gun assaults. Nowadays violence is viral, it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist. In an intensely integrated system like ours, everything can have an effect of destabilization. It’s like being straight out of a Ballard short story. As an attempt of understanding an historical moment and its implications Vidal realizes a wicked exercise combining all these influences and concepts.

Marco Scotini wrote recently about Vidal work ‘’ …An extremely intense recent film comes to mind; “Elephant” by Gus Van Sant, with which Vidal seemed to have shared certain choices of sides and certain operative lines. Also in this case ordinary violence is anatomised, reconstructed with a disinvolvement and a perplexing rigour, far from every perceptive emphasis.
As Vidal has said more than once our time is made up of “Powerful peace” in which the necessity of security lives alongside the ideology of terror; the idea of democracy with threat of control and the state of objection becomes the norm. In this order violence is normal: not only because it is filtrated by the media but also because it produces it itself. If on one hand, every day a bit more, violence becomes an emphatic spectacle (ongoing filmed war scenes and live catastrophes), on the other hand it allows us to follow our hero (to each his/her own), along the path of an automatic massacre with the innocence of a videogame or play station (once again “Elephant”!)…’’

Alejandro Vidal deconstructs violence. He realizes a structural analysis about its representation. He deals with notions of insecurity and within a framework that most of the time it’s very significant.

An important idea in Vidal work is Jean Baudrillard concept of art as a simulacrum. Baudrillard affirms that in our time it is impossible to distinguish the reality from the image that we have of it therefore these Images have replaced what they described.