Alejandro Arango

(Mexico City, 1950)

Author's artworks

20th-21st Century Mexican

A fleeting star of
, Alejandro Arango gave up his initial studies in advertising to enrol at La Esmeralda National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking and at Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. A painter, sculptor, engraver, drawing artist and illustrator, his work reveals echoes of graphic design and also of the cosmopolitan aspirations derived from his formative travels.

All his painting (and indeed his sculpture too) focuses on the human figure. He joined the ranks of the neo-figurative movement that held sway among young postmodern painters reacting against seventies neoconceptualism, and adopted a narrative approach, as he explains: “I like telling stories. A fiction develops out of an image, and I unconsciously capture in the painting a moment I wish to convey.”

Arango sources his iconography from cinema, television, media photographs and comic strips as well as the evident inspiration of the Belgian painter Corneille (1922-2010), a member of the
. He interprets them not so much as part of the logical sequence of a narrative but rather as a response to his fascination for visual snapshots and decontextualized anecdotes. Accordingly, his images outline the embryo of a tale without actually materialising it in an articulate narrative. Likewise, he drew many of his recurring visual references from his assiduous travels.