Alvaro Ledesma was born in San Sebastian in 1975.
He lived in Renteria learning the forgery and welder craft in his father’s workshop, till he moved to Burgos to start the Civil Engineering Degree. In that period he started to develop a passion for literature.
Once he returned in 2000, he re-entered the forge and developed his skill as sculptor, one of his most significant facets. He showed numerous exhibitions of sculptures and got his first commissions, the foundation of all the other disciplines that he would throw himself into later.
In 2007, he started to paint. Even then he refused to use the colour and he crafted the “Espectros” (1), a series of 100 drawings with schematic hieroglyphic shapes, which show the complexity of his inner world.
Meanwhile, he recorded the first videos, to which he wished to write the sound track. So he learned to play piano and violin, composing and improvising musical pieces immersing him in a new, musical, phase. He played solo piano and violin concerts, and live video art performances. As a musician, he also took to the stage in Theatre and Poetry recitals, composed and performed sound tracks for films, sound laboratories or video creations of other artists. He created/ constructed scenography for theatrical companies, dance and spectacles.
He maintains a close relationship with instruments, exploring them as another artistic method in the form of piano machinery or tuning the chords. He has became a luthier, modifying the aspect and sound of violins.
He continues to sculpt.
Between 2009 and 2010 he created the “Imanes” (2), his masterpiece of plastic arts and synthesis of all his previous works. They are a set of sculptures which study magnetism, equilibrium and duality.
In 2012 he reinvented himself and started to take photographs. He enumerated each image with a fictional date progressing towards the future. Each one in panoramic format, he considered them as photograms of a motion picture. He did self-portraits as an self-analysis exercise through an imagined world “Estudio sobre el alma” (3) and later he depicted people as characters in a plot, “Retrazos” (4).
In parallel, he wrote “Moscas en la cocina” (5). Aphorisms, thoughts, poems, sentences apparently unconnected with great virtuality and subtleness, an inner talk of the artist where the answers are glimpsed.
Nowadays (2015), after more than two thousand works as a photographer, Alvaro is developing the “Storyboards”, compositions of 12 photograms in 3x4 matrix followed with a “fly”.
1. Spectres. 2. Magnets 3. Soul study. 4. Pun with Retrato (portrait) and Trazo (stroke). 5. Flies in the kitchen.
* Translation: Igor Marín