Expediciones o la deriva como dibujo de la emotividad
Expeditions: To drift as an emotional outline

Throughout his thirteen-year career in visual arts, the Brazilian artist Alê Souto (Rio de Janeiro, 1973) has caused a silent and increasingly abrasive relationship between urban life and the distant geography created by remembrance.
        With his strolls through his hometown – Rio de Janeiro – and on the streets of Mexico City, he organically incorporates graphic gestures that appeal to the sense of transit and that mimic the language of these territories filled with multiple historical resonances towards a pre-Hispanic past connected to the glutted digital and technological reality of the contemporary world.
      The city is the tangled life of our anonymous defeats. It is the sectional glorification of immigration and the permanent blend of cultures: the distorted sign of looting.
  In this commonplace called the city, the poetics of Alê Souto come to life, infecting and overflowing with his view: on the papered aphorism of signs and posters, on the encrypted word is a shielded constellation and on the impossible illustration of an open time where cardboard is our shelter and paradoxically the symbol of consumerism, of an assumed neo-slavery. Alê Souto´s recycling and graphics are the registered meditation of our vulnerability; they are the povera architecture of belated progress.
      There is an affiliation to the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement in the work of Souto, as he activates art as a sensory and participative experience. The mass, the hustle, and the outlined composition of the colonial city are the setting of the artist’s drift, where he highlights a fragmented statement of the city, turning it into an energetic translation of transculturlization.
      Expeditions uncovers from the tropical underbrush the bench where Helio Oiticica and Dr. Atl left their itinerary written down and invites us to a ten-year passage of visual explorations, with installations and performances working as the intermittent journey log that account for the different layers and realities, just like the fusion of Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor with Mexico City’s Metropolitan Cathedral.
       It is with anonymous and schematic traces with spray paint from the salty walls of Copacabana to the transmuted Tzompantli that Alê Souto defines his journey.
  It is then that all the walked streets can rebuild an emotional memory that is oddly eroded.

 

Marlov Barrios