Adapta Project

Alfredo Gutierrez’s studio is an artists dream. It’s an old “bodega” with big windows and high ceilings located in Zona Centro, Tijuana.  It’s a quiet space where Alfredo creates works of art like the acrylics on linoleum from his Labio Leporino series (which will be on view in the show at 4 Walls during Ray at Night).

Alfredo Gutiérrez: The emigrant over the city

by Mayra Luna

The images of the Tijuana artist Alfredo Gutiérrez are composed by lines of a narrative. The work captures the reflective moment of a trip. The history of each one of the personages dissipates in a landscape that becomes diffuse while the image of the man is extended and it is clarified. On the background is the plot, and we can only guess by reading the man. The traveler moves away of the city landscape to reiterate that the moment has arrived from a separation. Separation that, according to the forms, seems to have always existed.

The man, evident protagonist of the stories, is in a clear superposition of the chaotic urban landscape. What is behind him is what it is being erased by the city in witch he lived. But although the human figures contrast in color and forms with the city background, demonstrate a existential reality that is compared to the urban reality. , Man and city, thus dissenting seemingly and color, reveal similar characteristics of wearing down. The city and its man - the unique one- seems to be in the same emotional state. It could not be of another way; behind it is not the city, is the history of that man in the city.

In these works, Alfredo Gutiérrez - whom to his twenty-four years he owns already more than a twenty individual and collective exhibitions in the Tijuana /San Diego area -uses techniques like aerosol, acrylic, oil sticks, pencil, markers and collage to construct the urban landscape, and oil to construct its personages. With that it calls “contrast between order and chaos, figure and abstraction” demonstrate, the distinction between man and city, the common sensation to the inhabitants of the polis: the split. An ambiguous split in which the man knows inhabitant of his space while he is perceived so distant to this one as a stranger. As if only through the images it was included in the landscape. It would seem that the concrete – as a difference to the soil-rejects him. That its roughness, ready to be fused with nature, would not take place in the city.

Although the city is Tijuana from where this young artist realizes his creation, its work does not take exclusive reference to this space. The marginal zones of this city of the north, with the characteristic homogeneity that gives them that layer of dryness that covers them, are of easy identification in the pieces of the painter; also it is the traveler or emigrant, iconic personage of the border zone. There are, in addition, elements that seem to suggest North American urban landscapes, area that also comprises with the mobility of this artist. Even so the structure of its images includes more than one locality. Each one of its cities is any city. And their characters, those men marked by time, the dust and the crudeness of life in the city, correspond to almost any nationality.

The representation of the city by means of the commutation and collage of materials - present in the work of Gutiérrez- they are characteristic of the art of the region, nevertheless, the esthetic of its work does not share similarities with the Tijuana artistic stereotypes. Its piece “Towards the decay” could be forced to enter the call of Chicano art, but at the time of contextualizing it within the rest of the work, any regionalism dissolves, being united to a speech more universal than it is evident in other paintings. Alfredo Gutiérrez is not representing only one city or its structures. Either a man of an ethnic group or its customs. He realizes an existential investigation: the one of the human condition in front of the city, the traveller before the phantasmagoric city that threatens to swallow him. Only that, very unlike the speech common in which the city prevails to the man, in the work of Gutiérrez the man dominates the city. Their characteristics and their figure stand out in the opacity of the large city. And the man who arises from that way is the solitary man. The one that has separated himself from the masses. Who pauses his trip to reflect. One that the city wears off, but doesn’t break. A man not common between the light multitude.

The man that Alfredo Gutiérrez builds in his pieces is more solid and strong than the cities he inhabits. He is the man who, like an artist, has taken the determination to mold itself and not to be molded. It is possible to even identify in the expression of his personages, the majority of them of outpost age, the characteristics that draws wisdom. This man is not property of the large city. He is the emigrant. one that is constructing its home in its person. For whom the only architecture that is possible to keep is the one of his bones. In their trip, the city and its buildings become, time and time again, in metaphors of the past.