Adolfo Arenas Alonso
AN ANDALUCIAN ARTIST OBSESSED WITH DEBAUCHERY
By Michelle May
Adolfo was born in Seville, Andalucia, the "land of olives" in 1972. He is an illustrator specializing in intricate and masterful graphite drawings. He studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Seville, Santa Isabel de Hungria, where he began specializing in drawing that resulted in him "becoming obsessed," he says. He is also a painter, sculptor, graphic artist and art restorer. Adolfo Arenas Alonso's work focuses on "the decadence of beauty accompanied, with a taste for the vintage look, where all characters obscure a feeling that they were something important at one time, and now, look like the noble privilege has decayed over the years, as they are surrounded by one exaggerated decrepitude."
"I try to make the technique of pencil realism and keep the deformity of my characters in contrast to a world of real objects," says Adolfo.
Les Insolents, graphite on paper // Alfonso Arenas Alonso
The eye cannot look away from the grotesque beauty of the Andalucian's art, with glimspes of exposed and straggling flesh or the occasional 70s bulge. From one square inch to the very next, your imagination is captured, filling in the blanks. The focus wavers between being entranced by the exquisite level of detail in perspective, pattern or the ironic whimsy of a taudry Count Olaf of Triana, playing bougie debauchery in the adandoned Baudelaire mansion at an indulgent dinner for the once beautiful and barely dressed (sigh). Alonso's art is as deep and long as that intentional sentence. The hints of elitism are met with questions dancing like the duende at Casa Anselma as Hepburn, Garbo and Napoleon sit upon tables accompanied by Henry Miller and Lord Byron. Insert a famous painting, photograph or statue placed surprisingly and undisturbed. The devil is in the details with Alonso—with these historical references and famous reproductions of great thought, juxtaposed in the collective imagination, amongst these contemptuously impertinent characters in irreverent activity. They are in full character, as if for the theatrics of La Barraca itself. You can almost smell the spilled wine and cigarette smoke and one can almost hear the sultry sound of Edith Piaf's 'Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien' on the phonograph, skipping.
Adolfo Arenas Alonso is as technically masterful as he is a talented and poetic storyteller, tapping perhaps the mysterious life and death of aristocratic floozy the Duchess of Alba and the creation of Goya's celebrated paintings in Volaverunt, to the indulgences of the Sine Nobilitate. "The matador and the insolent (Les Insolents) is based on the Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads) by Federico García Lorca, one of my favorite works," says Alonso. The metaphors in each drawing are endless.
García Lorca is perhaps Spain's most famous poet, a leftist in a fascist climate and an open homosexual, with quite an unconventional life, of love and friendships, like his close relationship to avant-garde surrealist Salvadore Dalí. In Gypsy Ballads Lorca writes of the contrasts between gypsy life and that of conventionals. Always making reference to detailed life in Granada, Lorca described this work "as a carved altar piece of Andalucia with gypsies, horses, archangels, planets, its Jewish and Roman breezes, rivers, crimes, the everyday touch of the smuggler and the celestial note of the naked children of Córdoba. A book that hardly expresses visible Andalusia at all, but where the hidden Andalucia trembles."
This description itself gives way to the very scenarios hidden in Alonso's art. To know of Spain, poetry and art, the story only deepens, like a "cante jondo", an Andalucian deep song of the gypsy or an allegory of Baudelaire, it's as if the art is an intellectual seducer finding meaning in the wreckage and ruin, like the mocked hand of Christ in Les Insolents or the falling tear in Giocondo il Bello...at five in the afternoon.
To see more of Adolfo Arenas Alonso’s artwork, go to page 70 of Juniper Rag, V.1.
