Gen #1 and #4, Diptych

Gen #1 and #4, Diptych, 2021 by Alec Franco
Mixed media (Acrylic, pastel chalk) on paper
Overall size: 50 cm H x 70 cm W
Individual size: 50 cm H x 35 cm W
Unframed
Signed by the artist

DNA is genetic information, hidden and encrypted in body fluids. Veiled data that we load, that we do not know and that someone knows how to decipher. Such specifications characterize us in our concrete individuality, make us unrepeatable and yet resist us. That chain of molecules constitutes a conglomerate of clues that someone elucidates because we do not know how to read it. We do not know the links that make up that nucleic acid that delineates us and characterizes us genetically. Curious phenomenon of not having access to such precise and accurate data about oneself. They skimp on us, they deny us despite having more authority than anyone to know their own characteristics. The geneticist, the scientist, is the one who can illustrate our exact and unique genetic conformation. We are carriers of a key that identifies us but we do not know. Alec Franco's DNA work inquires about this secret and inaccessible figure and displays these nucleic acid segments from color, shape and texture. DNA visually and plastically explores the morphology of our genetic sequence. Franco's series investigates that cryptography, its textures and nuances in a tension between the hidden hereditary transmission we carry and the manifested and displayed visually by his work. It raises the horror and emptiness of the encounter with oneself while his palette proposes the fullness and joyful plethora of those who reach self-knowledge, overcoming the initial horror of the encounter with their own identity and uniqueness that we carry without certainties. DNA proposes a way to access that knowledge that is elusive to us by another way, the artistic one
---------------
Alec Franco was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1972. He is a graphic designer by profession, he began his training in painting between 1991 and 1993 until the present.
It is through the presence of color, combined with an abstraction sometimes with expressionist and many other surreal overtones, where his work expands in various formats and supports (acrylics, oils, pastels, charcoal, asphalt paint, synthetic enamel, on canvas , paper) . , wood and steel) transiting mixed materialities that overlap, crushing the apparent figures against heterogeneous backgrounds.
“His work plays between the limit and the no limit, imagining the idea of ​​macro universes and micro cosmos, combining them in the same space, mixing, separating and uniting dimensions.”
He currently lives and works in Buenos Aires.