At the back of the room, a beautiful and intriguing painting begs to be looked at. Even some passers-by, passing by on the street, stop at the gallery windows to see it. It is “Abisal”, the gateway to the universe of Alec Franco (Buenos Aires, 1972). “My work plays between limit and nolimit, imagining the idea of macro universes and micro cosmos, combining them in the same space, mixing, separating and uniting dimensions”. Painted on thick handmade paper, its name suggests depths of the sea inhabited by living organisms, marine vegetation, eternal minerals. Through the movement of its brushstrokes, “Abisal” insinuates changes, like the universe that lacks a permanent essence. The painting establishes the rhythm of “El color no está en las cosas”, the exhibition at the Otto gallery curated and written by Gabriel Palumbo.
The artist displays 23 mixed techniques on paper, on canvas and wood in two series -“Plastic” and “Geny other independent works. They are abstractions that, as Franco says, at times have expressionist overtones as well as surrealist accents. The untamed forms, perhaps organic in appearance with some geometric trait and sharp, contrasting tones, seem not to want to reveal their origin. Despite the fact that some names of the pieces, coming from biology and meteorology, from astronomy with stars with sudden changes, suggest clues such as those of the “Gen” series that, perhaps, refer to molecules, proteins, cells with nuclei real. Do they allude to the “chaos” of creation, to a space-time continuum? What about the “Plastic” series? Do they point to some chemical process?
But the pieces leave it to the viewer who, if anything, gives them some meaning. Without ties and colors as vibrant as they are dim, in these works the artist “propels the vital experience from the light”, as Palumbo points out. The color is in the search of the artist, in his works and in the eye of the one who looks.
