Alek O.
La Prima Rosa

For this year’s edition of Milano Design Week, pconp is pleased to welcome at Spazio Lima La Prima Rosa, a solo project by Alek O

We could call Alek O.’s a poetics of the human, which also translates into the delicate manifestation of an error, an imperfection, an intimate, more hidden experience that tells of a domestic environment, to be sought in the details.

For example, in the choice of a wrong light bulb to illuminate a room. An error that shows itself and permeates every time the switch is turned on, a forgotten carelessness, which, in its repetition becomes with time familiar and welcoming. The simple gesture of turning on the light loses its function, but becomes charged with humanity.

The objects, the ‘things’ used (such as the tiles in the case of the sculptures in the ‘Minecraft’ series and the mattress nets in the installation ‘There was a lot of waiting’) often come from the world of craftsmanship and industry, the result of the work of expert hands and time-tested techniques, have their own alphabet and grammar, which Alek O. appropriates by distorting it, not creating, but re-creating a new language.

And so the nets, without their own frame, lose their function but retain the memory of what they had been. The grid structure, deprived of tension, is transfigured and reshaped into new patterns. It falls lightly like a precious curtain, living in space with a new guise, a new role.

The transformation also becomes, in the artist’s eyes, a possible means of preserving the memory, of a moment, of an object, giving it a different form, but one destined to last. The first rose given to the artist by her son can be preserved only if it is dried and stabilized: as graphic marks on the canvas, the rose petals no longer return the image of the flower we all recognize, they build an abstract composition, which speaks a more modern and universal language.

In her practice Alek O. (Buenos Aires, 1981) blends the common notion of the readymade with craft, embroidery and other traditional art-making forms. On the verge between transformation and conservation, Alek O. strips the objects’ common visual aspects and replaces them with geometric abstraction. Reversing the perspective of design, Alek O. favours re-creation over creation and deconstruction over construction.