NASTI DE PLASTI

"Nasti de Plasti" is the solo show of Alejandra de la Torre (Castellón de la Plana, 1983), a young Valencian artist curated by Sara Zaldívar for the Espinasse31 gallery in Madrid.

This exhibition, fun and carefree, aims to highlight the cultural clash that was experienced in the late 80s and until the late 90s, where everyday Spanish life coexisted with trends imported from the United States, such as Nike Air shoes, track suits, or fluorescent colors. Two contrasting styles, the old-fashioned versus the cool, the kitschy versus the modern, the local versus the imported, the news versus the music videos...

They say that the past was better, or is it that, with time, we idealize that stage of life? We rely on objects, scents, sensations to try to shape a memory, without being entirely sure if what we remember is real or a sugar-coated product of our imagination. We don't know for certain if the mind chooses, selects, and arranges what has happened arbitrarily.

In her artworks, Alejandra brings to light these objects from collective memory, managing to transport the viewer. With just that lightning-fast journey to another time, to an experience, for a fraction of a second, Alejandra considers the work to have fulfilled its purpose.

The artist's work explores the accumulation of objects as collections of memories, perhaps as a solution to the fear of forgetting, or maybe as a need to fill the voids of memory or connect with our past. It's the beginning of a kind of hoarding syndrome where, in many cases, it is through these possessions that we can learn more about ourselves, our obsessions, our concept of ownership, and our struggle against time.

Attachment, accumulation, the fear of emptiness, obsession, the concept of ownership, and memory are keywords in her work.

In her mixed technique, she combines painting with drawing, screen printing, transfer, or collage using everyday materials like notebooks, old books, tickets, which add a sense of everyday life to the pieces. Her exhibitions themselves are installation proposals where everything coexists to reinforce the message, which in this case is immersing us in the room of a millennial teenager.