Alejandro Magallanes: The Order of Chaos

A book featuring the wide-ranging work of internationally renowned Mexican graphic designer, illustrator, poet and artist Alejandro Magallanes, including posters, book illustrations, and works of art, as well as the artist’s thoughts about the nature of his creations. As “An exercise in ordering chaos,” in Alejandro Magallanes’, the author’s words, this bilingual English and Spanish monography seeks to “intuit new paths that lead to places never explored before” in the artist’s ceaseless play with letters and images. It is divided into five sections that introduce the reader to a fascinating visual universe where Magallanes “illustrates with words and writes with images. ” In texts throughout the book, the artist discusses the diverse nature of his projects (books, collages, photographs, letters and illustrations), reflects on his graphic style, and muses on whether the included illustrations, detached from their original text, function on their own as independent, autonomous creations that suggest new readings and meanings. Through this vast array of work, we can see how Magallenes’s process for creating illustrations and designing advertisements for important firms is always changing, depending on the printed object, that is, the text he is going to illustrate. The resulting images can be poetic, intelligent, childish, mainstream and even sometimes grotesque. They are examples of the different visions of an adult who refuses to stop being a child, one who makes believe and plays all the time, twisting ideas, images and words that can become part of our memory and stay with us forever.