Alex White Mazzarella was born in Boston, USA in 1979 and moved to New York in 2008. He graduated from Clark University with a degree in economics and studied city planning in graduate school. He set off immediately after to Barcelona Spain and consequently Hong Kong China where he would live and work as an urbanist.
His talent and affinity for drawing was noted at a young age and his world travels/observations have been a constant influence. His work has been inspired largely by street art and by the likes of Kirchner, Appel, Miro, Clemente, Basquiat, Avery, Pollock, Tapies and William Blake.
Self-taught in principle, he has studied under Larry Poons, Frank O’Cain and Phillip Sherrod at the Art Students League and continues to work with Hugo Bastidas. He has been exhibiting his work in New York since early 2009 after being discovered by Richard Temperio of the Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg Brooklyn.
His work is in private collections in the United States, France, Denmark and Norway.
La Mazza: the paintings of Alex White-Mazzarella… . .
A reality constructed by the artist’s vision of our current times … recreating our social landscape to one that exhibits our velocity of life … color as an attractor … the new relationship … distraction as attraction … fading room for existence … disconnect to reconnect. New York City is the current laboratory where these stimuli are being observed and translated. And street expressionism, known largely as street art and graffiti, is today’s cave paintings… an exhibition of human abstraction and the subconscious, this inclination to explore and express the void and its brilliance continues. La Mazza builds upon this contemporary form of expressionism, expressing the technology and commercialization induced reality we now experience and live. Blasting off from planet earth we orbit and come back on a different ship as we land on La Mazza.
From the Artist:
I create paintings in order to express and visualize states of minds that belong to my genes as well as the society that programs me. Working intuitively and physically through expression, and mentally through the construction of societal narratives, my paintings are intended to bridge instinctive and contextual realities. They are observations of the social systems that deliver us our individual destinations.
Going through life, I believe I am more than anything an observer… a student of the human on an individual and societal level where experience is my classroom and perspective my output. Sensitization allows for a bending and becoming of the place in which I exist. Consequently, my paintings are reflections of visions and sensations. Here in New York City this amounts to chaos, fluidity, optimism, deliria, absence, presence, and contradiction.
Recent New York Works; “Remixing Media to Remix Reality”
My recent paintings are voyages through everyday observations in New York City. Their creation has come through an abandonment of “decision making” and reliance upon transmission through instinct. I am using pastels, charcoal, acrylic, coffee, spray paint, enamel and collage to create through spontaneity.
“A universe of phenomenon spins, chaos, chemistry, creation. An ongoing evolution of moments. Infinite memory, inexistent, yet the foundation for every moment of light. Likewise we exist; minds churning souls searching, we interpret and create our moments… complicating, simplifying, questioning, confirming… all from an unknown source. The spontaneity of it all.”
“Big bang snapshots… glimpses into the unidentifiable source of creation via expression. An activation of the indigenous and subjugation of the conscious, remixing media and swimming through the metaphysical aquarium living and freezing realities.”