Hugo Alonso (Soria, 1981), exhibits for the third time in Llamazares Gallery, after his last individual exhibition entitled Puerta Blanca in 2021, returns to Gijón to present “Limbo”, an exhibition of 16 paintings in different formats. In “Limbo”, Hugo Alonso immerses us in a border state between wakefulness and dream, where monochromatism is the key to explore a universe full of contradictions. Produced in different locations over six months of travel and experimentation -from his studio in Madrid to the arid landscapes of Lanzarote, the serenity of the Empordà or the isolation of the countryside-, the work seems to emerge from a strange feverish night, where ideas appear as flashes that cross a consciousness altered by movement, music and fiction. The monochromatic atmosphere not only delimits the grayscale as a visual language, but also as an emotional state: an ambiguous territory in which light is as revealing as shadow. The figures, bearers of a mystery and a certain latent danger, emerge in deserted landscapes or urban settings that evoke fragments of a story that seems to tell itself in real time. The work, although pictorial in essence, is loaded with resonances: a narrative that could refer to the brutal realism of writer Donald Ray Pollock or to the echo of an almost cinematographic intrigue written by Bret Easton Ellis, whose rhythmic construction seems to dialogue with the music that Alonso produces in parallel under the alias “Lynda Blair”.
These influences, present but never explicit, enrich the images with a dense and fragmentary emotional charge, abstract and at times oppressive, like pieces of a diffuse memory. The result is a set of pictorial works that transcend the visual. They invite the viewer to transit through a psychological space full of ambiguity and mystery. Between landscapes in pause and liminal locations, Hugo Alonso places us on a threshold of disturbing harmony.
Francesca Reni
