Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck
Visual Artist
Berlin
Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck’s artworks are connected to current political events, which he uses to question propaganda strategies employed to convey values such as freedom, prosperity, security, and utopia, interweaving these principles with oil policies and global economic ties. Working in a variety of media, including photography, film, installation, and found materials, his discourse juxtaposes disparate elements from a variety of disciplines and sources to contextualize historical problems, from the Cold War to oil exploitation in present-day circumstances. On this interesting basis of reflection, his works become “poetic documents,” exposing shadows, cracks, and perverse moments in specific situations that reveal multiple layers of meaning and connections fraught with tension. At times, Balteo-Yazbeck refers to or incorporates the works of other artists, like Gego and Alexander Calder, as a counterpoint to his own discourse. Born in 1972, Balteo-Yazbeck graduated in Fine Arts in his native city – Caracas, Venezuela, where he extensively exhibited his work, and later moved his practice to New York from 2000 to 2010. He is now based in Berlin.
Artworks (1)
“El esquino,” a performative action by Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, consisted of a series of predetermined tasks that engaged the artist and the public in a theatrical, parodic fiction about late modern art and its circulation—an ironic response to late-20th-century neoliberal capitalism. The project referenced strategies used by geometric abstraction and other modernist movements, such as producing multiples, series, and multicolored editions of the same work to maximize distribution. For this purpose, the artist “invented, fabricated, and sold the most absurd object possible”: a small, triangular-based pyramid designed to “fit” into the upper corner where wall and ceiling meet. As a formal byproduct of modern modular architecture, it alludes to the spread of the “white cube.” Balteo-Yazbeck even mapped the sales locations and residences of the roughly 2,000 “esquino-inhabitants” who took part. Both the object and its slogan—“el esquino is the inseparable companion of the corner”—use Venezuelan humor and irony to reveal a conservative society structured around binary, heterosexual, and monogamous norms.