AB: A friend of mine once said something that I always loved … she said: In New York City there’s a lot of corners. What’s great about the city is that you get to meet so many different people who can help you understand all these different experiences, but then you could be in different neighbourhoods that have different immigrant communities or different types of ways that neighbourhood is structured. And if you give yourself the joy of being in great cities like New York or London, you could really have an incredible set of experiences just by going ten blocks in any direction. I really thought that this was an exhibition that really understood the joy of being in the city. It feels often that art isn't really addressing how we live in cities and also, like, why do we choose to live in them? You know, it just feels like it’s a great task to take on. A lot of art does things with nature, you know focusing on, like, the garden or the outside, the forest or the ocean or whatever. I’m into those – I make those paintings too. Or the interior space. You know, what does it mean to be in a small room or a house or apartment? And I’m from New York and I genuinely love being outside. I love walking through Soho or walking through Downtown Brooklyn. You know, these things bring me great joy, but it’s also a very different set of experiences to being outside of a city context. I love walking through Central Park or, you know, Mayfair and going shopping at a fashion store, a high end retail store. These things bring me great joy! So, I wanted to hold that experience, because I think they also bring many many many people great joys.

HUO: One thing that is also interesting that you mentioned in terms of the Paris show is that if we continue to do exhibitions there needs to be a kind of … reason why we do exhibitions. You know, which goes beyond the idea of a PDF. Because, basically, a lot is just duplicated on phones. And I think the exhibition you created in Paris is, in that sense, a very multi-sensory experience, because you physically go into rooms that aren’t easy to enter: sometimes you need to go through loop-chain curtains, metal shutters which sometimes are open and sometimes are closed, there are doors, there are removed doors … it’s kind of like a display feature in a way, the exhibition. You seem to put paintings into display features, no?

AB: Yeah! Well I think one of the pressures of painting right now–every generation has new pressures of painting and painting has to find a way to reinvent itself–is the pressure of digitalisation. For painting, for efficiency, it has just become about PDF art. So I think we need to give people more reasons to go to exhibitions. We need to give people more reasons to go to museums or galleries and that’s a great opportunity to really engage the different senses. And I actually think that it’s a great opportunity that I need to put my painting against. You know, you go to a church and you see a Caravaggio and you understand that Caravaggio needed to meet the pressure of the great sculptors and all of the artisans that he was in relationship with. So I feel like it also puts a different pressure for me to make sure that my painting can really be against other things and really still survive as a painting. And so that’s kind of why I thought, most of my exhibitions now really need to be about giving people a reason to go there. It really needs to be an installation. You need to feel something walking through the door; what does it mean to walk through a door? What does it mean to walk into the gallery space or the museum space? And walk around things, walk through things, look up, look down? You know … change the floor! You can’t just have a poured cement floor, it’s a great opportunity to do something else with the floor. For you to change your senses. For you to walk away and understand that your senses were really engaged. I think painting calls for that right now. I really love going to see exhibitions where it’s just a painting on a wall but I think, when I listen to my friends and other people who maybe go to exhibitions, it’s very rare that I hear them talk about art in the excitement that they’ll talk about a Taylor Swift concert. These concerts have become extremely exciting … one of our mutual friends Es Devlin, does these concerts that are fully engaged, engaged with all of your senses, your sense of community, your sense of spectacle. I’m competitive as a painter, you know, I’m competitive. I want my paintings to go up against a Taylor Swift concert [smiles and laughs].

HUO: And obviously it’s not only the exhibition, in that sense, that is challenged … Margaret Mead said once that, like, it needs to be more multi-sensory as visitors spend only a few seconds in front of artworks because it only appeals to the vision sense. And she says we need–you know, the anthropologist Margaret Mead?–she said we need more multi-sensory rituals. To appeal, in a way, to all the senses, because maybe then it’s going to bind visitors more.

Excerpt from Middle Plane Issue No.8 (Winter/Spring 2024). Read the full interview in the magazine by ordering your copy here.

Photographer: Sunil Gupta

Stylist: Taylor McNeill

Alvaro wears Bottega Venetta throughout.