Alexandre ESTRELA (1971)

Alexandre Estrela was born in Lisbon in 1971 and is one of the youngest artists present in the Modern Art Centre’s permanent exhibition of its collection. He has a master’s degree from the New York School of Visual Arts and completed his undergraduate painting degree at the Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (Lisbon’s Universidade Tecnica’s College of Fine Arts) and, with an Erasmus Scholarship, at the Rietvield Academy in Amsterdam. Having started to develop his work in the 90s, Alexandre Estrela participated in some of the most significant exhibitions organised by a generation of artists that had a strong awareness of the possibilities and conditions they could themselves create in presenting their work to the public. In some of these exhibitions Estrela participated as a curator, an activity he currently continues to pursue, along with chairing the video festival “Hi8 Short Video Festival”, as an extension of his creative work as an artist.

Alexandre Estrela works in a variety of media, but his work in the field of video has drawn the most attention. By working with the image-creating potentials offered by video’s technical language, his work promotes the constant questioning of the perceptive nature of images. He thus follows a practice whose origins may be traced back to the 70s, when the first portable video cameras permitted artists to explore new material. However, he combines this with the recent technological advances that the computer now allows. This technique, video, is no longer used simply as an instrument for the capturing of images. It is also an instrument that creates other images that have only been made possible by an exploratory and non-conformist manipulation of the materials used. Resorting to common and quotidian technological means – the machines that have become a regular adjunt to everyday life, the television set, the video camera, the projector, Estrela attempts to utilise that which is normally perceived as technical error or fault in the manipulation of the machines. The machine’s more or less unpredictable reactions are incorporated into the final image. This exploratory approach is evident in The Nails’ Feedback (1998), a piece belonging to the Modern Art Centre’s Collection, where simultaneous footage of two nails being nailed into a white wall and their projection generates feedback (cause an infinite regression of the images on the projection surface). In One in a Million (2003), for example, a “pixel” (the tiniest unit of a digital screen) is blocked and its trail interferes with footage of a journey through the streets of New York.

Alexandre Estrela is able to reveal what may be called the signature of the technical image and by making the image opaque he is able to confront us with the notion that we inhabit a technological reality. In this sense, our perception as spectators is also challenged when we observe a piece like TV’s Back, for example. The precision in his gesture lies in playing an image of the back of a television on a similar television set. The image coincides with the object that is presented and underlines it. This weaving together of the projected image with the real object also has the consequence of creating a convergence between time in the past (the moment of filming) and the present (the moment the spectator spends in front of the object). Additionally, it presents itself to the onlooker in a special way: the experience of the artistic object is constructed by the spectator from the conjunction of what is real and present and the simulation elaborated in the past.

To Alexandre Estrela, Art is in itself situated at this meeting point between what each individual knows art to be and what exists objectified into art. Of more importance, than the object or the onlooker, is the context into which they are inserted, the mechanism that generates the images, that houses them, and of which they are a part.
LILIANA COUTINHO