Alfonso Vicencio

Bio

Alfonso Vicencio is a multidisciplinary printmaker and painter from the Washington D.C. area. He received his BFA in Printmaking from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2021 and MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2025. Alfonso has exhibited in the District of Columbia Arts Center, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, and the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Alfonso lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Artist Statement

BLUE PILL: Was Jean Baudrillard right/not to mistake the map for the territory

Based on binary systems and the core question of whether our human sense of “realness” is becoming lost in an ever-increasingly media-saturated world, my work navigates ideas of the “real” (physical, laborious, manual) and the “simulated” (computerized regurgitations, endless references and self-references, copies of things with no determinable origin). Mediation between formalistic representation and different technologies in our current new media age becomes a way to rationalize the overwhelming and overstimulating mass-commodification around us. Drawing from an ongoing digital archive of screenshots, photos paused on films and TV, and snapshots of everyday life—such as fences, shadows, graffiti, and street detritus—I digitally warp, distort, layer, and mask common, recognizable imagery to create abstracted scenes of a mythical world. In this fictitious world, underscored by the use of hybrid processes hand-layering traditional artmaking processes—screenprinting, drawing, painting—over inkjet prints to meld digital and analog sensibilities, I seek to collapse the notion of “reality” as it is simulated in ubiquitous mass media to critique and expose how the line between “real” and “artificial” have become blurred. Playing on tensions inherent in my work—in material process and in the interplay of light with movement, surface with depth, space with accessibility, and chaos with humor—the abstract world I create is as whimsical as it is inscrutable as the source images become completely obscured: even small nods to familiar forms, creatures, or language are not meant to anchor the viewer into a particular time or place.

RED PILL: Can I be right/we decide for ourselves what is real, what is not

In my continued exploration to find veracity amidst the daily bombardment of imagery through mass digital media, my process involves an additional layer of introspection into personal “authenticity.” I search for what is “human” in a world full of mechanized beasts—algorithms that filter-feed us unknowably selective bits, AI ads and art, superficial networks of online bots, and social systems enforcing stereotypes through derivative iterations of not-quite-real people. Approaching both digital archiving and physical mark-making like self-portraiture through curation—which images to bring together, which to archive in the first place, which surface areas to intervene with my own hand—I open up an avenue within my construction of “realness” to self-consciously explore human motivation. Through multimedia creation, I can dissolve the societal narratives of differential structures which drive our worldviews and instead employ a choose-your-own-adventure approach to visual language and visual identity. Since everything can and will be manipulated, from our icons to our beliefs, I attempt to distill this ideology from the true (real?) individual who is anonymous, fluid, and placeless.

Contact
E-mail: alfonsovicencio171@gmail.com