Soul Minimal
by Axel Becker

The complexity of a soul, both human and as the essence of an artistic creation, can also be expressed through an extreme synthesis. This is the case with Axel Becker's intuitive works, characterized by reductionist operations of colors and shapes that erode the distance and distinction between painting and sculpture. He draws from everyday rhetoric to synthesize and condense our reality into few elements. This is evident in the constructive parts of the work where new readings appear aiming to achieve balance and produce compositional relationships in the context in which they are represented.

Becker creates a three-dimensional "plastic poetry", inviting reflection on the complexity of human communication and its codes; his ability lies in proposing a minimal language that moves away from the ordinary and repeatable meaning of signs and inserted objects, to reach the unique event of subjectivity and interpretation. In fact we can notice inclusions of melted metal, taking on new meanings, in his monochromatic canvases.

For example, the mimetic effect of the fluidity of water is actually generated by metal; more precisely, by the change of state of tin from solid to liquid, which then condenses into a new form of reality that is no longer merely imagined. It is a sort of "poetic alchemy" that springs from the imaginary and transmutes into the real world in new conditions of representability.

It seems almost an attempt to reproduce the "feeling" of water, its sounds, its density, held in its particular dynamism. The fusion interacts not only among the molecules, but also with the surrounding environment, leaving a clearly visible and changed trace. In his other works the union of form and content is even more explicit, in new relationships between the meaning and signifier.

Therefore, an original model of the meaning as a context is produced, of Duchampian memory, which depends on the exchange with the viewer and with the space in which the objects are placed; and this is how a corkscrew is isolated from its context and original function and, placed on a canvas, can be realized as a new index, for example as imaginary clock hands. In addition, the sculptures, particularly those in fiberglass, play on movements of elegant sinuosity; they are simplifications of the human figure designed to indicate a formal purity, reducing it almost to abstraction.

Peculiar are the concave and convex effects and the layer of paint that creates a smooth and almost perfect structure, able to reflect light and create evocative dynamic impressions. And it is thanks to color and light that the synthesis of dynamism makes us fully enjoy the sculpture, pushing us to its integral reading. In Axel Becker, therefore, we catch experimental curiosities, in techniques and contents, that condense and summarize the experiences of our contemporaneity.

Dr. Giorgio Vulcano