Bichos

Alexander Bühler

November 29, 2018 – January 12, 2019

Asymmetrically correct

A big butterfly lying on its back, with its wings spread and abdomen wide open. Tiny insects move forward, one after another, to extract their pittance from the decomposing lepidopteron cadaver.

At the peak of the psychedelic era, we donned multicolored t-shirts that reproduced the exacerbated colors in visions caused by lysergic acid.

Born in 1977, Alexander Bühler is too young to have surfed, even the end of the dying flower power of the early seventies, but his infiltrations of color in previously folded canvases refer to this bygone era where purples, violets and pinks mixed with greens, blues and oranges—one more explosive than the other—dressed a tousled youth in search of better being.

Butterflies are undoubtedly one of the most convincing examples of those symmetries produced by nature and, as opposed to our bodies and faces whose close observation quickly reveals asymmetry, one struggles to see any difference on either side of the axis that cuts the animal in two from the top of its head to the tip of its abdomen. The mechanic of Bühler’s pictographic experiments revolves around this symmetry whose random inclusions of paint benefit them, while the vagaries of the liquid subject to gravity do what they will.

Apart from the objects presented on two bicolor canvases spread on the floor, a blue butterfly with enormous red stains and pierced by a meandering black thread is the only explicit figurative motif in the compositions produced by Bühler for Bichos.

The other seventeen pieces—obtained through the aforementioned process—are proposals left to the viewer’s imagination. Indeed, one quickly starts playing the game of discerning presences in the stains and drippings left along the now disappeared folds. The long and stretched silhouettes remind us of Alberto Giacometti’s elongated sculptures or, closer to us, those totems painted in black erected by Dr. Lakra. Here, enigmatic faces with bulging eyes refer to those painted in the last century by the author of Life in The Folds.

Finishing a work of art is source of torment, generally. When does one decide a painting is finished? When should one stop and put the brush down? Alexander Bühler has, this time, almost totally eluded the question.

Michel Blancsubé

Mexico City. November 29, 2018.