Alex Ber (1979, Toronto, Canada) makes drawings, paintings, photographs and conceptual artworks. Ber tries to comprehend language, by choosing largely formal solutions. Transformed into art, language becomes a decoration. At that minute, plenty of ambiguities and indistinctnesses, which are inherent to the happening, come to the surface.
His conceptual artworks sometimes radiate a cold and latent violence. At times, disconcerting beauty emerges. The built-in visual seductiveness, as well as the conciseness of the exhibitions, further complicates the reception of their manifold layers of significance. With a minimalistic approach that is subtle, he attempts to focus on the task of presenting. Contour, the nature or content of the presented art is not primary. The things that are essential are the aim of presenting as well as the brief.
His works doesn’t reference recognisable form. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and interpretation that is potential becomes multifaceted. He attempts to develop types that do not follow rational standards, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the audience to make new personal associations by employing abstraction.
Associations and meanings collide. Space becomes language and time becomes picture.
His works are notable for tactile nature and their perfect finish. This bears witness to great craftsmanship and is of great value. By breaking the passivity of the spectator and creating situations, he creates intense private moments masterfully created by means of omissions and rules, refusal and approval, luring the audience round and round in circles.
His works focus in the inability of communication that is used to visualise the dysfunctions of language, the dissonance between content and form and reality, the effort of conversation. In short, the lack of clear references are essential elements in the work. By rejecting an objective truth and international cultural stories, he contemplates making art a craft that is performed using formal rules that are clear and which should always refer to social reality.
His practice gives a helpful set of allegorical tools for manoeuvring with a pseudo-minimalist strategy in the world of conceptual art: these planned works resound and resonate with pictures culled from the fantastical land of imagination. By focusing on techniques and materials, he seduces the viewer into a world of equilibrium that is ongoing as well as the interval that articulates the flow of daily occasions. Moments are depicted that simply exist to punctuate the human play so as to clarify our existence and to find poetic meaning in regular life.
His works are predicated on inspiring situations: visions that reveal a sensation of indisputability and calm contemplation, combined with subtle details of elements that were peculiar or bizarre, humoristic. The work is aloof and systematic and there is an impartial and trendy vision used.
His works are presented with the aim not to provide an idealistic perspective but to identify where the environment as well as light are important. The energy of a spot and its emotional and spiritual oscillations are almost always important. By pushing on the evocative power of the work a little farther and replaying the work for each exhibit, he needs the viewer to become part of the art as a type of component that is added. Artwork is amusement: to be able to touch the work, as well as to interact together with the work is important.
His works challenge the states of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, portrayals and ideas normally work. Alex Ber currently lives and works in Mississauga.