Alejandra Prieto exhibits her charcoal work twice
Furniture made with Viennese, meat, chocolate and a crushed lemon. From the beginning of her career, the artist Alejandra Prieto (32) played with unconventional materials in art to experiment with new forms of representation. Thus, she used food to replicate design icons: from a Wassily chair to a Philippe Starck juicer, Prieto's was a reflection on consumption and luxury.
Until an aesthetic problem led her to a discovery that changed the course of her work. "I wanted to use the color black and there wasn't enough moldable material to make my objects, until I found charcoal," she says.
Since then, Prieto has investigated all the plastic possibilities of the mineral. She traveled to Lota and Curanilahue to get large blocks of charcoal, which she polished into gloves, a lamp, and even a 3 x 3 meter igloo. "It has been an interesting process. My first works were more illustrative, but now they have become more poetic. With coal I can talk about energy, the economy and the working class," says Ella Prieto.
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A member of the generation of the early 2000s, along with Johanna Unzueta, Francisca Benítez and Cristóbal Lehyt, who have achieved international projection, Prieto now shares with them and eight other artists the exhibition Contemporary Contamination, at the MAC in Parque Forestal. This is a group exhibition that was exhibited in 2010 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in São Paulo, in which themes such as globalization and current architecture intersect through models, videos and photos. In it, Prieto exhibits some charcoal shoes and a mural of a sheep painted with tar. "It's the logo of an expensive clothing brand and the shoes too are a luxury design. It reflects the tension that exists between fashion and art," she explains.
It is not the first time that Prieto has spoken about opulence versus simplicity. Her best-known piece is a lamp with black tears that she showed at the beginning of the year at the Havana Biennial. In this one, Ella Prieto replaces the diamond with carbon, minerals that have the same chemical origin, but that appeal to opposite types of life.
At the end of 2011, the artist won the CCU Scholarship to do a four-month residency in New York. The result will be seen in December, in the brewery's art room, but an aperitif is now being presented at the Museo de la Solidaridad, in the group show En medio. Art and society. It is an almost untouched block of carbon, on which a 3D animation of the dust released by the material when polished is projected. "I am not interested in criticizing the system from art, that is why I take my work to an increasingly less literal and more poetic dimension. I am interested in the political in the sense that my work can have different readings. And it is strange what happens , because making shoes is much more difficult, but easier to understand. Making less with coal is simpler, but it has a more complex reading", he concludes.
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