PAINTING IN CONNECTION WITH MEMORY: ALEX BECERRA AT VETA
By Álvaro de Benito
Becerra explores, in two parallel solo exhibitions, the power of painting to connect memory, emotion, and digital record—crafting through pictorial language an instrumental balance between the everyday and the virtual.
Alex Becerra (Piru, United States, 1989) presents two complementary solo shows at VETA by Fer Francés: As Serious As Your Life and Baile del Internet. In them, the self-taught Californian painter delves into personal experience, lived moments, and digital culture and imagery to probe the potential of painting as an instrumental element for introspection and memory.
His work reveals a clear commitment to the contemporary practice of painting, reinterpreted through neo-expressionist tendencies where strength, gesture, and the power of the stroke alternate with figurative importance. In the section comprising As Serious As Your Life, Becerra structures his practice around his own environment—whether sentimental, rooted in memory, or spatial, drawn from the surroundings where that memory unfolds.
The Californian artist captures the simplicity of everyday life in his figures and subjects, yet imbues them with an emotional and affective patina that elevates what is depicted into a powerful recollection. Through his expressive technique—where broad, seemingly irregular strokes coexist with well-defined, strongly figurative edges—Becerra reaffirms the power of painting as a fundamental tool for honoring the domestic as the backbone of identity and belonging.
In Baile del Internet, the artist draws upon the digital universe, along with his own memory and archive, to study the impact of screen images—their chromatic variations, those digital hues that seem to exist only on-screen—and the technological traces embedded in our visual memory. Through the mediation of the machine, the footage and recordings Becerra employs filter and reinterpret family memories from past decades, interweaving musical and visual recollections.
His works reference recorded performances by musicians tied to his cultural and familial background, such as Chalino Sánchez and Valentín Elizalde, to whom he grants a second life through his reinterpretations—not so much of the artists themselves, but of their captured moments—on canvas.
Alex Becerra. As Serious As Your Life and Baile del Internet can be viewed through December 20 at VETA by Fer Francés, Antoñita Jiménez 31, Madrid (Spain).
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