Visual artist Alexandre Marta (b.1979) constructs his art using various mediums: drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, video and sound. He often gives his practice a title Not just an error, referring to his interest in provoking error and playing with reality, “because reality doesn’t play by itself”.

In his solo show Ersatz at HIAP Project Room Alexander Marta presents an extensive series of drawings completed during his residency in Helsinki in the summer of 2009, together with two video works completed earlier.

Plug was filmed in South Korea during an artist´s residency. The video features a group of masked men in a black van on the way to complete a ritual-like mission in a city. The work Empire continues on the urban imagery and expands into an eccentric, almost hallucinatory symphony of perceptual fragments collected from the streets of N.Y.C.

The drawings, the largest body of work in the Project Room exhibition, are grouped in several thematic, cartoon-like series and present a man like figure in various states of transmutation, exploring the boundaries of the human form and questioning the interconnectivity of humanity with its attainments and failures. Where sentient turns into inanimate, and vice versa, the artist appears to be asking: is this the real thing or just a replacement?

Alexandre Marta has completed his M.A. (D.N.S.E.P.) in 2007 and has also studied philosophy in the Paris-Sorbonne University. His residency in Helsinki is organised within an ongoing exchange programme between HIAP and CEAAC Strasbourg. The exchange is supported by FRAME – Finnish Fund for Art Exchange.