Alan Fontes is a painter of three-dimensional space. Not just because it represents a space that unfolds inside the canvas, as in the traditional image of painting as a window to the world. But because the artist transforms the world into painting. It is as if we are inside the painting, as much as it is completely outside itself.
The procedure does not mean a definitive abandonment of the canvas or the plan, nor does it mean an attempt to save the painting from an end that never came. On the contrary, it is the result of both a freedom that the present makes possible and an achievement by the artist. Some of his paintings feature a discontinuous plane in relation to the background, as if detached from the set, but within it. These are paintings of reflections on glass surfaces or construction elements. If in some works there is an investigation of architecture and utopia, in others there are ruins. The series of destroyed houses made from images of cities that have experienced earthquakes, more than a human tragedy, symbolizes the collapse of an ideology.
There are canvases in which the artist uses aerial images that are distant from the space experienced by the body. The flattening of the topography and the terrain's features could seem contrary to works in which the horizon line is visible. However, the aerial view presupposes an experience mediated by technological devices such as GPS, just as pre-existing images taken from magazines and the internet are references for houses and landscapes. In any case, it seems to be through the image that the relationship with the world becomes possible.
Alan Fontes' painting is not content with physical limits. She literally falls off the screen, like when bottles fly to the floor. The scenography is also the work. The interior of the room blends in with the painting. The gray wallpaper turns pink on the canvas. What would be a background becomes the protagonist. In this work, the entire environment has references to films in which the bonds between couples are broken. The painted objects that appear on the outside of the canvases perform an experience inverse to that of Van Gogh's painting in the film Dreams, by Akira Kurasawa.
Ruined architecture and ideas, broken personal relationships and images in place of bodily contact are signs of dystopia. As the continuity between what happens inside and outside of Alan Fontes' paintings is not just due to the use of perspective, his works convert the space we inhabit into fiction. And his evident technical skill tends to be camouflaged in his sarcasm and self-irony.
Cauê Alves, 2016
