"One is aware of what has changed when, faced with the same object or situation, one's reaction is different. One day, visiting my grandmother, I came across those porcelain figurines that every grandmother has on some shelf in her house. These figurines had always seemed really ugly to me, and I had never understood why people were interested in them at some point. But it was on this visit that my gaze changed, and suddenly I found myself appreciating them differently. The curious thing is that I was able to remember my feeling of rejection towards them, that is to say, I was aware of that 'self' that was no longer the one in the present, and that made me more aware of my changes and, in a way, of my current self. From this small anecdote, GROW UP is born, where through 3 works – 'Childhood', 'Folder', and 'Heritages' – the viewer is invited to journey through their life in a way (childhood, adolescence, and maturity) to stop, observe, remember, and rediscover... To observe and discover in order to remember, to remember in order to reflect and be aware of who we were and who we are, to rediscover certain feelings and sensations through memory and contemplation, in order to, in a way, be aware of what we have gained but also of what we are losing along the way." Specifically, 'HERITAGES' is a series of paintings where I represent my grandmother's figurines through that new perspective I described at the beginning of the text, that different vision of things through maturity. In these pieces, a universe emerges through a subtle juxtaposition of languages at the service of an iconography in which recreated and bricolaged objects serve as fetishes to construct and reconstruct meanings around the living and the lived. I represent the before and the now in a point of coexistence, starting from classic ceramic figurines, but representing them from my language, a more urban and current language." -Alejandra de la Torre
Artist Alejandra de la Torre investigates in her work the attachment people feel towards objects, why we need to accumulate possessions, and where the limits lie between what is considered normal and what can become an obsession. Starting from the particularity of objects, she makes a broader reflection on everyday acts related to different forms and motives of accumulation, from preserving memories to others like collecting. De la Torre combines painting with other techniques such as drawing, screen printing, transfer, and even the presence of physical objects.
