Alejandro Mandel

The gripping, plaintive landscapes in Alejandro Mandel’s oil paintings don’t just bare the scars of humanity’s destructive hand, but actually feature rips in time, introducing art historical motifs into contemporary settings. The effect is at once deeply moving and strangely elusive, as if the conflation of sceneries – an angel hovering over a train yard, a Victorian hunting party near a modern coal mine – were about to disappear back into the flow of history.

For Mandel, these quizzical scenes have an undeniable urgency. “My work,” he explains, “expresses the changes that I see in my environment.” As a Chilean Jew who lived through the 1973 revolution and eventually immigrated to America, Mandel is especially sensitive to notions of dislocation, fracture and collision, and the places he paints are, above all else, crash sites. The scenes are never overtly violent, though. Mandel renders our culture’s all-pervading sense of acceleration and fragmentation in tangible, eerily beautiful paintings, providing a much-needed pause during which to contemplate our ever-changing landscape.