No rosto

Alexandre Rola

Some artists look for inspiration in museums. Alexandre Rola finds it on the city’s walls. Born in Porto on 27 October 1978, he has been drawing everything around him for as long as he can remember. He studied Drawing and Painting at Cooperativa Árvore and, in 2003, completed a photography course that gave him visual training and the freedom to experiment. In 2004 he began a degree in Design, which he finished in 2008, and later wrote his master’s thesis at ESAD on urban art interventions. He has exhibited regularly since 2001. His work grows out of humble everyday objects, above all the advertising posters he tears from the streets. Alexandre appropriates them, takes them out of context and reinterprets them, creating new images where words are transformed and take on new meaning. Each piece holds a fragment of reality, with all its social weight. With a gaze that is both knowing and critical, he explores themes such as the female condition, silencing and the presence of the body, sensuality and the clash with reality, without losing the humour of someone who will also paint a simple encounter with a cockroach. His compositions play with chance and a deliberate disorder that rejects the established and opens itself up to whoever is looking. Between social critique and the joy of living, Alexandre Rola’s painting reminds us that art also hides in the things we walk past every day without noticing.