Alejandro Ospina (B. 1970)

Vibrant with an electrifying dynamism of colour and shape, Alejandro Ospina’s large-scale painting Red Lucky, 2014, exemplifies the Colombian artist’s painterly explorations of an image saturated and increasingly interconnected world. The work feels alive with an explosion of multi-layered and overlapping imagery, drawing the eye in quick, non-stop succession across its busy and bustling surface. Broad swathes of scarlet red and lime green paint sweep across the canvas, as black and white checked blocks extend from the distant depths of the left edge as if from an infinite vortex. Semi-formed architectural structures composed in minute detail seem to emerge and recede, and everywhere biomorphic shapes seem to take on new meanings and personas. The work is a whirlwind blur of the abstract and the figurative, comprised of a kaleidoscopic multitude of symbols, signs and ciphers that compete endlessly for attention. ‘I try to work in ways that reflect continuous changes in attention at a rate and method that would have seemed absurd before the arrival of the Internet, simulating what happens in our minds when we jump from image to image accumulating and merging layers of visual information,’ Ospina has said of his energetic style. ‘I want the work to reflect how the Internet has mutated the way we look at sets of images or contemplate a stream of information.’ Pulsating with a boundless flow of iconography, Red Lucky encapsulates the vivacity of our technological age.