French and Argentinian artist, Alexis Yebra was born in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1967. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Mendoza (Argentina) and received solid practical training in painting with the Argentinian master Orlando Pardo. He studied Sociology at the National University of Cuyo and obtained a master’s degree in Sociology at the FLACSO (Latin-American Faculty of Social Sciences) in Argentina.
As a painter, Alexis Yebra has taken part in several exhibitions and art shows, and in 1989 was awarded a distinction by the Vendimia visual arts jury –the most prestigious regional prize in Mendoza. His works appear in galleries and private collections across Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay (CAV collection in Museo del Barro) and France.
The validity of painting (by María Lightowler, curator)
Alexis Yebra finds in the recurrent use of crossing-out the possibility of forgetting what has been learned, but also an interstice to reopen the game of painting and memory.
It works as a resource of concealment, but also as a liberating forgetting that relieves the tradition of the history of art and painting.
With strokes that seem to simulate seams, he manages to unite that binding ambiguous feeling between memory and amnesia, to create without the burden of conventions.
He turns to the pictorial and also allows himself to play ironically with objects, with words and quotations that he inserts into the supports, all to question once again the validity of painting in the present.
Yebra is an astute artist who, with a subtle gaze, manages to highlight the framework of art itself and the mechanisms that transform it into an instance of communication, as complex as it is necessary.
