ALEXA PEREZ REA

2000, Mexico.

Raised in Cancún, she took art classes at a local workshop for 8 years.

In the summer of 2018, she took a visual art course at the New York Academy of Arts, ending the month with an exhibition.

After graduating high school she enrolled in the Master in Visual Arts at AD’A

At the beginning, her art was more focused on portraits and later started revolving around the female human figure, exploring the same, creating visual movement and giving a sense of no identity to the bodies.

The last year has been an exploration of abstract art and expressing her own emotions.

Currently, she is trying new mediums, and playing with colours, she is using her old concepts but giving them a more abstract approach and using the imagination to create emerging pings.

Her works are mainly oil on canvas, although she is exploring all media and continues creating art.

“During quarantine, I started painting some of the selfies that I had taken throughout the isolation and wrote a small text about what was going on and reflected on what I was doing with my time. I decided to play with some colours and with the brushstrokes, as well as adding some text that described my thoughts”.

After a period of experimentation with abstract painting, Alexa Perz Rea began to relate to the figurative painting, around the same time with a series of naked female bodies – painted from breast to neck (but faceless, in the manner of useless statues), in front of a variable monochrome background – and with a series focused instead on herself, whose explicit title is Quarantine Selfies.

These are four paintings made during the recent quarantine period, in which the artist, starting from a photographic self-portrait, has created reinterpretations in painting: leaving the background neutral or making it “graphic”, the concentration is on the expression of the face. With a mixture of irony and amazement, Alexa depicts herself in some poses of everyday life, asking herself some questions; the period of isolation has led us to reflect on ourselves with greater intensity, in the case of artistic expression this often translates into an “experimentation” about our own image.

The series in progress – four paintings of the same format are exhibited here, but they could increase in number over time – also poses a question about the relationship between the digital image and other media: in this case, it is also a various consideration of time, that is the difference between the instantaneousness of a selfie and the longer period of elaboration of a painting.