The Marriage

Amsterdam, 2016

Marriage: that I call the will of two to create the one who is more than those who created it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Marriage is a socially or ritually recognized union. Deepening into this, it could even be taken as a union between the artist's work and the public, between the message and the receiver. Always, nonetheless, it is a fusion, an opening!

In Alexandre Madureira’s work dwells the will to seduce through the interaction between the altered image of reality and the needs of people to change the relationship between signifier and meaning, between reference and linguistic sign, to confuse, to move, to allure. It is a symbolic and formal system that deals with issues occurring in common registers in which icons, knowledge and collective memory all condition us as cultural beings.

From the general to the individual, from the collective to the personal, these paintings are an imaginary space in which different types of knowledge, thoughts and feelings from different eras and times come together. In the same space, images from high, low and popular culture breathe together, never respecting any logical timeline, to create a new idea, be it poetic, ironic or critical of some current political or social event.

It is about creating a personal language that appropriates mass culture to show a mirror of our times using narrative and illustrative strategies to reveal something critical.

Alexandre Madureira is an observer who shows us one way of many possible on how to tackle the state on which mass culture has created the passivity and uniformity of the masses.