MAURICIO ALEJO

CENTRO DE LA IMAGEN

(FRAGMENT)

Ya sea a través de fotografías, video, esculturas o instalaciones, la investigación y producción de Mauricio Alejo se han centrado en ciertas preocupaciones materialistas, exploradas en gran medida mediante objetos cotidianos, con el fin de proponer ajustes a sus hábitos, así como a sus percepciones generalizadas. Aunque la mayor parte de los cuerpos presentes en sus proyectos son entendidos, por lo general, como entidades comunes, cuantificables e inertes, el trabajo del artista evoca una vitalidad material que pareciera desafiar la división entre lo orgánico y lo inorgánico, lo inerte y lo dinámico.

Su producción subraya, de cierta manera, el papel activo que las cosas juegan en un complejo ensamble de actantes, en los que participamos a la par de otros entes no-humanos, que conforma a la sociedad y su cultura. Históricamente, existe un legado intelectual que se ha abocado al estudio del objeto planteando, entre otras consideraciones, que la posibilidad de un cambio político, social o de sensibilidad implica un cuestionamiento y cambio en nuestras relaciones dentro de ecosistemas complejos. En lo que se refiere al legado de la vanguardia artística, con más de un siglo de historia, y con la tradición del ready-made, el objeto ha sido utilizado con el fin de cuestionar la excepcionalidad de los seres humanos —en este caso, y en un principio, atentando contra la noción de autoría y de construcciones ideológicas como la errónea idea de genio.

Artishock, August, 2021 Daniel Garza Usabiaga.

MAURICIO ALEJO

OMR GALLERY

(FRAGMENT)

The video series Gravity, Twig, Line, Hole, by Mauricio Alejo (Mexico), explores how it is possible to understand the energy of matter from the standpoint of physics. Each one of these videos simulates perception, ones own natural state, and the reality of images that are almost abstract, which acquire meaning on the basis of the relationship they established with the viewer.

In gravity, a balloon defies gravity. In twig, the supposed shadow of a branch tricks the perception of the observer. In line, a static horizontal line blurs and changes it state. And in Hole, a circle becomes a sinkhole. Each one of these images produces its own material discourse, and at the same transmit a sensation of resistance, given by the moment in which matter shifts from its original rest state to an active state, passes through the action of an external agent, and enters a state of motion.

Art Nexus, Sept-Nov 2009, Issue 74, Fragment

MAURICIO ALEJO
RAMIS BARQUET GALLERY

In the context of a year marked by global instability of various kinds. Mauricio Alejo’s work, with its ephemeral character and insistence that everything in life is bound to fall apart, suddenly seems prescient. For “Limits of Fiction”, the Mexico City-born artist presented videos, photographs and mixed- medium installations—mostly devoid of color—that capture the fragile moment between climax and collapse.

In the looped video Endless Sphere (2008), for example, a perpetually spinning peso set against a white backdrop indefinitely prolongs the viewer’s guesswork about whether it will land on heads or tails. The C-print Tower (2007) depicts a column of iridescent soap bubbles that reaches a seemingly impossible height without popping. In Bubble (2009), also a C-print, a billowing white sheet appears to float midair in a white kitchen.

Ironically, the most visually cumbersome pieces in the show were the most conceptually rigorous. The installation Holding on Tight (2009) consisted of two books—Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space—embedded in each other via interleafed pages. (If books could hug, this is what it would look like.) They were suspended at eye level by thin white ropes stretched diagonally across the room from floor to ceiling. Although the ropes threatened to pull the texts apart, the interleafed pages kept them locked together. The point seemed to be that Marxist-inflected production doesn’t preclude poetry, but this could have been communicated more economically. Similarly, the rather brilliant installation Breathing (2009) would have been even better with less physical mass. Here, eight translucent plastic bags, attached to clear tubing that ran under the gallery door to the street, subtly inflated and deflated with gusts of wind outside. The piece eloquently described the flux between external and internal and, with its visual association to life-sustaining medical technology, pointed to an uneasy relationship between sustenance and suffocation, but the multiple bags and bulky tubes seemed a bit de trop.

The simple elegance of the installation Tunnels (2009), on the other hand, took one’s breath away. This piece began anticlimactically as round mirror installed near the door of the gallery that reflected a leafless tree silhouetted against the white sky. It continued, revealing nothing of much interest, with four additional mirrors mounted high on the walls of the gallery’s first and second rooms, above the other artwork. Finally, deep in the last room, which was unlit as if the room were empty, a small mirror hung near the ceiling caught the reflections of the others to reveal an unexpected glimpse of the winter sky that stretched above you when you first entered the gallery. In the midst of so much suspension—spinning coins, bubbles ready to burst—a way out suddenly seemed possible, and as you exited the gallery, you found yourself looking up.

—Casey Ruble

Art in America September 2009

Mauricio Alejo
OMR Gallery
Mexico City

Mauricio Alejo always points out the obvious. That’s his thing. There’s no inner truth or revelation in his work; there is just the world as it is, in its physical evidence. There is not weird science, just plain physics. This (which may be inferred by the statement which gives the name to his new show at OMR’s in Mexico City: “Space that is Time”) showcases his obsession for the little mysteries behind household matters that jump up as metaphor of the transcendent –if ever- or at least of the forces that keep everything moving, still.

This is what might be appreciated in his video loop of a coin that rotates, endlessly, on its axis. An awe that has been delegated to affairs concerning a more scientific approach to thing, brings out –nevertheless- the beauty of physical awareness in Alejo’s work. Laconic, almost Zen-like in his settings and scenarios he reveals essential physical notions that have been taken for granted since ancient Greece.

Air –not the notion of air, but air- becomes the essential material for his slight tower built upon bubbles. Surface, light and tension are examined as a precarious landscape, but also as the minimal prodigy it contains beyond its commonplaces. It’s organic construction appeals to a heaven like tissue, detached of its earthly attributes, unsustainable beyond its documentation for a show. The unsustainable is a topic for Mauricio Alejo. To sustain the unsustainable, at least, has always been one of his quests. That status may be awarded to the white thread that traces a line through a table. Beyond chance and pattern, the thread clings beyond the border of the table (as of the border of things) as a container. It is air. It clings through the thread, it’s contain by it, at least for a moment or two. The water vapor is more consistent when it fills up the room. Still it won’t last.

An empiricist, Alejo details the indistinct relation perceive between time and space. A discussion that offers a glimpse over temptation; to art or to science? That is the question.
It is not that Alejo tries to answer it. He just marvels at it, malignantly.

Ricardo Pohlenz
Flash Art Nov-Dec, 2007

MAURICIO ALEJO
OMR
Mexico City


Mauricio Alejo’s refreshingly straight-forward videos and photographic pieces uses Geroge Mélies-like rudimentary special effects to uncover the sculptural qualities of household objects and place them in modest, amusing narratives.

The nine quirky video pieces sown here uses a stationary camera to present minimalist images that are disrupted by an outside element. In line (2002) the video of two thin parallel stripes dividing a white screen is transformed when a finger comes into the frame and reveals the lines to be the product of a stream of water. Esfera Interminable (Endless Sphere, 2007) is a continuous loop showing a coin spinning on its edge. Rather that presenting some metaphor for capitalism, the piece succeeds as a result of its uncomplicated directness, akin to the work of Martin Creed.

Most of the six photographs in this show were concern with the camera’s ability to arrest time. “Tower” (2007) portrays a dish full of soap bubbles. Corner (2007) depicts and old tennis shoe wedged into the corner where two walls and ceiling meet. Both images hint at the staging process that preceded the photos.

Through his subtle wit and childlike embrace of curiosity, Alejo creates work that resides in some small overlapping territory of naïveté and profundity.

Federico Monsalve
Art News, December 2007