“I never accepted reality as I saw it.” We visited Chilean-Peruvian artist Alejandro Cardenas in his Madrid studio and entered a space in which there is more to the world than what you see.
”I always had this suspicion that the world is kind of an illusion. And the reason I felt that way was that I could go to sleep at night, have a dream, and be in another world that had nothing to do with this one. It looked nothing like this world, had its own rules, had its own physics, had its own creatures, had its own…everything.”
“Drawing for me has always been the first and cleanest way I was able to try to translate some of the things I see in my mind. I didn’t learn to draw to make nice drawings. I always drew to give form to the things I was imagining.”
Drawing inspiration from Surrealism, science fiction, and magical realism, Cardenas creates surreal, meticulously composed scenes featuring polished, gridded interiors inhabited by angular, faceless figures. His signature humanoids – narrow, wire-frame silhouettes adorned with colorful zigzag patterns – appear calmly reclining, sitting, or standing within minimalist architectural settings. Though these figures lack traditional sensory organs, they convey emotion through posture and gesture, creating a complex spectrum of suggested feelings and psychological presence.
“I feel like every painting has this aspect of surreal abstractness. No painting is real. But what other medium has the power to illustrate the craziest things humans have ever come up with? And that’s why I don’t feel original at all. I feel like I’m another person in the long line of people throughout history that have used painting to bring something into the world that isn’t already there.”
“Painting, for some reason, allows humans to communicate what they feel. So that’s why I get frustrated and uncomfortable when people constantly keep pushing this idea that painting needs to be beautiful and realistic. That’s not what painting is for. Painting is this unique format that humans have devised. to be able to communicate completely intangible information and to make the invisible visible.”
Alejandro Cardenas (born 1977, Santiago, Chile) is a contemporary artist whose paintings and sculptures envision a post-human world in which human forms and their environment coexist in harmony and unity. He earned his BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2000. Before dedicating himself fully to studio painting, he had a successful career as a multimedia artist, working across illustration, graphic design, and videography. For over a decade, he served as lead textile designer and art director for the influential fashion label Proenza Schouler. He was also a founding member of Lansing-Dreiden, a New York-based transdisciplinary art collective that produced musical albums, a literary journal, and multimedia artworks. His work in both art and design has been reviewed in prominent publications, including The New York Times, Vogue, and AnOther Magazine.
Alejandro Cardenas currently lives and works in Madrid, continuing to develop his vision of post-human figuration and surreal, architecturally informed worlds. He was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in his studio in June 2026.
Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Edited by: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026
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