Laguna Brotherhood

Alex Hubbard makes videos and paintings through which he plays with expanding the possibilities of these media. In some cases the videos serve as a way of documenting and understanding his pictorial work, while the latter is brought to the field of sculpture by means of a variety of experiments with industrial materials that the artist has perfected over the years. One of these exercises consists in adding layers of urethane, resin and fiberglass to the canvas, onto which he sticks objects in order to produce a sort of relief. In other cases, the sculptural character of his paintings arises from urethane molds that replace the canvas, thereby lending a transparency to the painting.

Two lines of exploration are constant in Hubbard’s production: the performative —as exemplified by his filmic work— and the processual. The latter is directly evident in the pieces that refer in one way or another to the artist’s manual labor, as well as to his experimentation with the reactions and properties of each material he uses.

Laguna Brotherhood was made by blowing up ink prints, which he later transferred to linen panels. This piece exemplifies the artist’s way of working, which involves applying and pouring out acrylics, oils and urethane in layers, generating a sensation that the painting is still wet and creating what critics like Artforum’s Suzanne Hudson have understood as a sort of “industrial color field.”