Courtesy of Ali Alejandro
Through art, Ali Alejandro is simultaneously learning, experimenting, applying, and listening.
Vogue Philippines invited 10 artists to showcase what “celebration” means to them through their chosen medium. Through art, Ali Alejandro demonstrates the beauty of experimentation.
Across industries, it’s undeniable that there’s a renewed interest in the digital realm. Artist Ali Alejandro realizes the exciting possibilities of combining experimental, traditional, and digital elements through “new media art.”
With the advent of digital facets in every aspect of our lives, it’s only natural that the art world has made space for new mediums. Alejandro brings poignant works of art to the forefront, looking toward technology for a space of experimentation.
From a young age, the artist has always been an outlier. “I go by the name AADA, which are my initials. I grew up with family members having abbreviated names as sort of a ‘code’ to individualize them from others who might have similar names,” Alejandro tells Vogue Philippines. This moniker would end up establishing his idiosyncratic style.
While he was a music major in college, Alejandro grew fond of art history and technique, eventually leading him to graduate with an art degree in painting and graphic design. Beginning his foray into fine art with purely experimental pieces such as drawing on television screens, he noticed merging both digital and traditional art forms provides another dimension to his craft.
“Ultimately for me, it made the art enjoyable, and so I continue that passion up to today,” he says. Alejandro’s body of work comprises pieces emblazoned with creases, lines, and folds, that can be likened to gleaming, crumpled tin foil.
With these works, he tries to veer away from the idea of being totally abstract. “I’m constantly looking at how each work can have some sort of representation [and] in more recent works, a figurative connotation,” he continues, “I find that there is movement within every inch of the messy, distorted subject matter.” For his contribution to the “Ten Days Of Seeing” list in theVogue Philippines December issue, Alejandro presented “Everlong”—one of his distinctive crumpled artworks.
Alejandro believes that when something is crumpled (bad drawings or old candy wrappers reminiscent of one’s childhood) and tossed away, it’s a “piece of memory that was taken for granted—a memory that never got developed.” Throughout his works, he finds a “unifying idea that is almost completely distorted and discardable.”
By pushing the envelope with his multifaceted pieces, Alejandro hopes to “strive for the next best way to convey [his] art in an age that is redefining fine art at an uncontrollable rate.”
Instead of focusing on storytelling alone, Alejandro’s pieces are centered on technique to overcome the ebb and flow of ideation. He concludes, “Ideas can get old, but the way you convey it can be something that is timeless.”
Ali Alejandro
