En ausencia de Willy (Willy's Absence)

Based on black-and-white images, Alberto García-Alix’s work o!ers a social urban portrait of the Spain that arose from restored freedoms. In his work, street characters create the iconography of a profane calendar of saints whose attributes are leather jackets and high heels. The power of these images and their symbolism reflect the intensity of those crazy years when, in the artist’s words, ‘nothing was enough’.
En ausencia de Willy is likewise a portrait, this time depicting the absence of the artist’s brother, who died of an overdose during the heroin epidemic. Paradoxically, the absent person is there in the photograph, taking a leading role. Willy is missing, but his shirt remains, lying on the ground, accompanied only by a pencil sketch of him. García-Alix thus offers an image in the form of a funerary monument, conveying to us, ‘in his eternal absence’, the portrait of his deceased brother.

Francisco Rojas