Alfredo Hlito. A Tenacious Permanence

The central focus of this exhibition are the effigies, the character that accompanied Hlito from the early ‘60s until the end of his life.

His effigies also have to do with a “message”, encrypted in the symbol, but there to those who are open to comprehending the power of this image and its ability to generate empathy and responses from the viewer. 

Hlito thought art’s images to be “metaphors of the visible”, and as such, they involve resemblances, but are never identical to what we see. They are immaterial, they transcend the stretchers and the canvases. They have a ghostlike entity of their own, of pure appearance. They do not copy a model, but are their own model, and so enter the world where they did not exist before, populating it.

The “Alfredo Hlito. Una terca permanencia” (Alfredo Hlito. A Tenacious Permanence) exhibition makes use of the different visual instances (paintings, drawings, texts) the artist produced in order to narrate the unfolding of his personal mythology of fictional beings, which nonetheless symbolize sacred and profane beliefs from all times and all cultures. It is a cosmogony of humanity, nourished by the themes and styles of universal art history. Symbols, archetypes, existential intuitions and premonitions permit us an approximation to the creative process of an artist who continually analyzes his own practice and listens very closely to his unconscious.