S.U.E.R.T.E.
LUCK (Acronym word play in Spanish)

One of the causes that make contemporary man unrest is to feel vulnerable when in front of unknown forces of nature or chance. Nature, creative and destructive dimensión, the universe's content, rebels constantly against the rational thinking that insists on believing it is the owner of nature's fate. The 19th Century poets understood this fake chimera; this is why Mallarme announced that art is a mirror of the cosmos where, opposite to the platonic theory of eternal equilibrium, the chance appears as a comet to announce the unexpected. In some cases, this new significant changes in a radical way our destiny: the rebels call it a revolution, the artists call it a revelation, the lovers call it reverie, the ancient call it sortis, sortilege, magic, in one Word: LUCK (SUERTE in Spanish).  
         This uncertainty and its multiple dualities, loving and existential, popular and intellectual, artistic and prosaic, is the subject matter and, at the same time, the creative play of the series S.U.E.R.T.E by Alê Souto. The work's motivation lies in our primordial desire to modify destiny. Souto establishes a direct relationship, an alignment if we follow his cosmic references, between the chance games and identities, in this case, male and female. He proposes to structure an artistic speculative and loving system through an action that intervenes in the lottery game with the participation of individuals that appear after reading a sign on the streets, a fortuitous accident. The artist moves to search or lose, a game of encounters and discounters, like in bullfighting; artist's luck.
         Incorporating popular activities like lottery games and its public to participate in art is one of contemporary art's most significant challenges and interests. Art and society have become the subject matter and the topic of the contemporary debate. Souto's new element includes in this debate the impossibility of control over the results of a work that includes the public; even more, it doubts its effectiveness. Souto brings back the concept of art as magic and the artist as a magician, an idea proposed by Apollinaire, emptying the utilitarian sense of the economics and the authoritarian of the political in the art to favor its creation, the inexplicable, to link the search for the chance to its actual findings: a ticket to adventure.

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Humberto Vélez