– Versione italiana a pagina 2 –
A colorful and overflowing journey, vibrant with objects placed on tables covered with checkered white and red or white and light-blue cloths, with floral patterns on a bluette background, and solid colors ranging from strawberry red to shocking pink to pearl gray which here, among the multicolored brushes of Elisa Alcalde, loses that usual aura of melancholy and becomes a “sunny” gray instead.
These are the dazzling tables full of objects, colors, books, bottles, papers, and a thousand other trinkets illustrated by this young Chilean painter, who manages to lead us along this unusual path through decorated tables that are true “travel journals.”
As we nibble on cherry tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and thick layers of butter spread over slices of untoasted sandwich bread, we catch sight of book titles, advertisements, and phrases that pique our curiosity.
It’s impossible to remain indifferent to such vitality: each table becomes an illustrated story bursting with ‘special effects,’ as the colors and shapes of food and objects make these glimpses of laden tables lively and full of exuberance.
We never see the diners, yet we seem to hear their chatter, the children running around the table…
It’s not just painting but also audiovisual work, like the Nomeolvides Audiovisual project, created in the winter of 2020 when quarantines and curfews were still in effect. The time spent necessarily at home, however, led to encounters between Elisa and various artists, most of them musicians.
Elisa Alcalde, born in Santiago de Chile, where she lives and works, studied film from 2006 to 2012. In 2012, she developed the micro-publishing project Pequeño Zine Ilustrado but, above all, began painting with watercolors, and today Elisa lives from her art. In October 2018, she published a collection of short stories titled No Corresponden. During this period, she worked on various projects in audiovisual, cultural, and digital communication, with painting as her one constant.
