Safety Chunks
Alejandro Vázquez Tomé
It is very complicated to find ourselves in this fast-paced world, sometimes we don't seem to find ourselves in anything, sometimes we find ourselves in everything at once, sometimes we need a mistake, something that stops us long enough to be able to see the landscape, other landscapes, our own landscape. Turner's "Rain, Steam, Speed" seems today a providential work of how successive technological advances have diluted real space like loose brushstrokes on a canvas. The world is spinning faster and faster, and the new ability to be anywhere and nowhere at the same time through a screen only blurs the lines that used to give us some kind of certainty as to where our feet are treading. Living in a world without certainties and through screens sometimes generates the need to create our own safe space. A landscape that exists, not as the representation of a material and tangible place, but as the delimitation of a comfortable plot within an intangible world that is ungraspable and incomprehensible on a deep level, a network of comfort, a habitable space within the immense aridity of the post-digital era. These small pieces of security, these personal nests, this network that everyone builds around themselves, are also the engine of the algorithms that move the world, but if we look beyond the screen, and manage to unravel the emotional value of these landscapes we can find something warm within the coldness of this diluted world.
Alejandro Vázquez Tomé. Born in 1999, at the turn of the century, in the working-class neighbourhood of Calvario in Vigo, Alejandro Vázquez's youth was marked, like that of many others of his generation, by the processes of deindustrialisation, the economic crises and the increasing digitalisation of the world. This context will mark what will later become his working space, which will clearly focus on issues of identity, human relations and the power of the image in a post-industrial and digitalised society. He is a graduate of the last graduating class of Fine Arts from the University of Vigo and despite only having taken his first steps in his artistic career he has already collaborated with the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo and has been awarded third prize in the last edition of the Xuventude Crea awards.