Studio
L.E.D.
Edith Clever 2023 (film)
Five Car Stud 2018 (film)
Decay
Stadsfotograaf 2012
Thrash
Approach
Vitrine 2008
CV
Commissioned work
6am.space
Booklet with 23 analogue photographs shot on 35mm.
Part of Dialogues, a bundle containing 2 booklets featuring a play by Dutch author Oscar van den Boogaard and a photo book by Alex Salinas.
Limited edition of 400 copies
With the exception of one image that shows a view through a car window of tropical vegetation, such as sunlit palm trees, all the images are from within. These inside pictures deal with the idea of the approach; they have clearly emerged out of different places, but at the same time seem placeless.
They present themselves as disengaged. One can only guess what time of day it is, let alone which location. With the exception of one color print where an abandoned overexposed little paper flag depicting the black Flemish lion on a faint yellow ground merging with its background is shown. The imagery drills from pictures that have been lived, scratched or full of graffiti extrapolating the smell of urine showing traces of years of usage, abuse as if mutilated. We see corners, ceilings, light sockets, it seems that somebody has turned the light on and off and all of a sudden we feel we are somewhere else; as if the brief split second of darkness has transported us to another world.
The other imagery shows us the pristine nearly surgical clear interior of a plane. Where on a screen suspended and hovering over the seats an image propels itself through space, encapsulated within its white surrounding and intersected by curved sharply contrasted dark lines. As if the surrounding has discarded itself and has turned to a nearly abstract format from which it reformulates itself. People appear, but mostly from the back. We find ourselves amidst a crowd: it's noisy, there is loud music, frantic movement. We are trapped. One person turns his head around, gazes right into the lens; it's time to move. The other portraits of people are taken form existing photographs. Here the flashlight produced, by the renewal of taking a picture of a picture, washes the faces away creating blanks, holes in the pictures.
The work of Alex Salinas reverberates along the lines of contaminating the image and the depicted object; by fetishing them in a way that they camouflage the distance between what is portrayed and the viewer. The black and white photographs measure time and light through contrast and dispersion, giving the image the sort of texture or void and taking them to the icy edgy point where they could break. The color photographs show gesture and composure portraying endurance and presence on demand. Juxtaposing glamour with experience, vulnerability and even disease. Alex Salinas's approach is therefore multilayered; it doesn't just deliver a fractured image but one that works towards the viewer as a depiction of a fragment as a whole.
Luc Tuymans, december 2008