Stoa Gallery | STOA Gallery in Art Central Hong Kong 2025 with a dialogue between two Spanish artists, Conchi Alvarez and Diego Cerero

24 Feb ART CENTRAL HONG KONG 2025

Posted at 11:35h in Art Fairs, Uncategorized by Stoa

ART CENTRAL HONG KONG 2025

26-30th of March

BOOTH
ARTISTS

Our project for ART CENTRAL HONG KONG 2025 presents, in dialogue, the works of two Spanish artists who, through figurative pictorial portraits, but with very different formulations, represent the lack of social communication caused by new technologies. People who do not actively participate in social life due to the technological barrier created by old age, as in the case of Conchi Alvarez’s paintings. Or by the barrier that these new technologies represent for almost any age, turning the ignorant into disabled and handicapped for most everyday tasks, as Diego Cerero’s pieces denounce.

Diego Cerero is a young artist who has recently started to work with STOA. His portraits attract and surprise because of the size of the paintings, but above all due to the enormous proportions of the heads, which almost overflow the canvases. He uses a striking composition with only one element: the face, since the backgrounds are neutral and almost flat. Far from the genre of the traditional portrait, and even more so from the classical canon, the new proportion that Diego proposes is a colossal head which would correspond to a 11-metre human figure.

Diego manages to make the viewer ‘work’ by forcing them to stop as they pass by the painting, awakening their dormant or anaesthetised critical spirit, facing a saturated reality of the inconsistencies in the society of the consumer and the detrimental use of new technologies. Diego´s youth gives him a privileged position, from which he can observe and denounce how the advance of these new technologies is relegating people who are still active and who now join the large group of individuals that are becoming isolated and frustrated by the impossibility of communicating, all of it in caricatured portraits full of humour and intelligent criticism.

Conchi Álvarez, in her series “Watching life go by”, presents portraits of the best and most genuine observers, the elderly. The majority of them, already retired from active life, are therefore considered ‘jubilado’(retired) which comes from the word ‘júbilo’ (joy), implies enormous bliss and happiness, but this is not usually the case. This series suggests different ways of ‘Watching life go by’ when the Third Age arrives. They are, as far as this series goes, people from a rural world, which means that the problem of their lack of communication caused by these new technologies is exacerbated by living far from the city.

The artist surprises these elderly people, dwellers of small towns, some of them with less than 100 inhabitants, in specific moments of sociability at the town festivals. Most of the time lost in thought, they are perfectly extrapolated to the other millions of elderly people all over the world. Sometimes they look at us from a very deep inner world, surprised by our presence, whereas others plunge into their memories because it is an asset that cannot be taken away from them. They are characters full of dignity who observe from a point of view that only comes with time, and only from a space that has accumulated years and years of life experience. Some contemplate life indifferently, peacefully waiting for their final moment, others long for their lost youth, all from an isolation from an external ‘noise’, from a hostile world in which new technologies become, not allies, but aggressors which trample on individualism and the dignity of people, by compelling them to depend upon others for the simplest of tasks.