“Ni orden ni caos” by Fernando Lorenzo.

 

Soon, the necessary and unique moment of the painting had to give way to successive concentric circles. Therein lies the portentous magnitude, that unsustainable attraction of his painting, that constant outpouring of the contradictions that life successively presents to us and that in Alonso's painting must have appeared in time and space.

 

Neither the "secret adventures of order"—as Borges says when referring to Valéry's preferences—nor the chaos of the unrecognizable serve our painter, who, lamp in hand, seeks to individualize each terrible thing within the whirlwind. Therefore, all his paintings seem necessary, opportune, almost expected within the concatenation of our existence. In some exemplary tragic moments, his painting and reality seemed to compete in horrors, except that his paintings had the mission of elevating pain toward the light of the world, while reality imposed the mission of burying it. 

 

Passion for the human condition and incomparable mastery—that is, craft and idea—(not always hand in hand) are the chemistry that produced and will continue to produce this moving precipitate that is the work of Carlos Alonso.

 

In that generation of his, influenced by postwar art and intertwined with everything from surrealism to optical art, from expressionism to cubism, his work resembles a beacon in the all-too-enduring fog of Argentine passion.