Baile del Internet: Alex Becerra
As Serious As Your Life is the new exhibition by Alex Becerra at VETA by Fer Francés. Becerra turns inward, exploring the concept of place and memory through a deeply personal lens. The paintings draw from intimate moments and familiar spaces, such as his home, studio, family, and neighborhood, by which he explores how recollection and emotion intertwine. Each image becomes an act of preservation, transforming fleeting scenes of domestic life into enduring symbols of identity and creation.
Self-taught artist Alex Becerra approaches painting as both a discipline and a form of meditation. He explains:
I've focused on building muscle memory and delving into all facets of painting to evoke a feeling of home while maintaining an open dialogue for the viewer. My atelier has been my workspace for over a decade, and I believe in the artist's power to preserve daily life, much like historical painters. I am not critiquing place or domesticity but rather embracing my current stage of life, recognizing the urgency of the present moment. The discipline of painting has brought new pleasures, pushing me to my limits and allowing the frustrations of new techniques to guide my process.
His self-taught process is one of experimentation and endurance, in which frustration and pleasure coexist as integral parts of creation. This methodology lends his paintings a sense of immediacy and sincerity: brushstrokes remain visible; colors come to life, and surfaces bear the record of labor. Through these gestures, Becerra situates himself within the long canon of historical painting, while using it as a framework to explore contemporary ideas of identity, belonging, and authorship.
By contrast, Alex Becerra presents his second show Baile del Internet, where he turns his gaze toward the digital image, its textures, colors, and distortions, and examines how it reshapes our visual experience and relationship to memory. Working from archival and found footage collected over the past five years, Becerra merges family photographs with stills sourced from the internet, especially from 1980s and 1990s music performances and broadcasts. These include iconic images from live shows by Chalino Sánchez and Valentín Elizalde, reimagined through paint as both homage and transformation.
At the core of this series lies a fascination with artificial color—tones and hues that exist only in the realm of the screen, generated by light rather than pigment. Becerra describes these as “digital tones”: colors that blur, smudge, or glitches in ways that elude the human eye and resist traditional categorization. By translating these ephemeral, screen-bound visuals into paint, he invites us to reconsider how perception, technology, and nostalgia intertwine.
Together, these two exhibitions articulate opposing yet complementary positions on painting: one rooted in the physical immediacy of lived experience, the other in the spectral luminosity of the digital image. Through both, Becerra reaffirms painting’s enduring power to translate the intangible—emotion, memory, light—into presence. His work suggests that whether illuminated by the glow of a screen or the weight of pigment, the painted image remains a vessel for connection, perception, and the persistence of human touch.
Born in 1989 in California, Alex Becerra is a Los Angeles–based artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, and sculpture. Renowned for his expressive use of oil paint, Becerra builds thick, tactile surfaces that pulse with energy and movement. Deeply informed by the legacies of European modernism, particularly German Neo-Expressionism, his work merges classical motifs with fragments of everyday life.