ALEJANDRO CARDENAS: OLYMPIA

Almine Rech Gstaad is pleased to present 'OLYMPIA', Alejandro Cardenas's sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.

December 21, 2024 - February 2, 2025

His exhibition 'OLYMPIA' brings together a suite of artworks that questions the role of painting in the context of accelerated image culture. The artist draws from the mutable nature of mythology, though in a very loose way, instead, we see an unfolding set of narrative works where unreal characters engage and play with fire in their pictorial landscape.

Art history is central to Cardenas’ work. The exhibition title brings to mind the work of Manet or Cézanne. His aesthetic and compositional influences range from the oddness of Balthus and Christian Schad, to the stylized approach to form and line in Henry Moore and Roberto Matta. Yet, what makes Cardenas of the now is how his work also is infused by the forms of car mechanics, post-modernist furniture, Instagram memes, and the shape and structure of insects.

He is currently fascinated by how technology, social media, and our accelerated sense of hyper connectivity has called meaning itself into question, how the bombardment of images, text and ‘content’ in our lives has lessened the impact of all meaning and language. The increasingly banal experience of seeing violence or death while waiting in line to order a sandwich. His work, however, is not negative. There is hope and humor here.

Painting is a medium unlike any other in art. It carries the weight of history on its shoulders. It is a medium referencing itself – technically and visually. Cardenas is conscious of this history while also feeling very personal and reflecting his own experience. Cardenas refers to painting as a clock – "a time keeping device for humans", he explains. "A painting part of an unbroken chain of production. It's literally civilization".