The painter, illustrator and professor Santiago Alemán has once again written another page in his fight against oblivion with 'Lanzarote, traditional architecture', a luxurious publication by Ediciones Remotas that brings together six color plates that reproduce constructions of the island accompanied by a text by the architect Luis Díaz Feria, also translated into English and German. The presentation of this new island editorial milestone will take place this Wednesday, December 20, at 8:30 p.m., at the Sociedad Democracia of Arrecife.
This editorial project, which has the collaboration of the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage of the Government of the Canary Islands, is in turn another piece of the vindictive, didactic and emotional journey that the author makes through each and every one of the islands of the archipelago, from El Hierro to La Graciosa, and which translates in each case into six plates and a specialized text.
In 'Lanzarote, traditional architecture' readers will find drawings of ancestral and popular homes and engineering that portray a unique and valuable way of inhabiting the space. It is an architecture built over centuries by anonymous builders and that, in most cases, has practically disappeared or is in an agonizing phase of extinction. Faced with this situation, the figure, the gaze and the pencils of Santiago Alemán emerge again to insist on the enormous heritage values and the attractive purity of its functional beauty.
Díaz Feria emphasizes in his text about Santiago Alemán that "in his works, the passion for heritage is channeled through the patient exercise of drawing, discipline of the eye and the hand" and adds that in this way he illuminates "drawings exquisitely balanced between the analytical and the expressive".
The author
Santiago Alemán was born in Arrecife in 1952. At the age of 16 he began his Fine Arts studies, first in Tenerife and then in Madrid at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de la Escuela de San Fernando. He taught for 38 years, both in the Higher Studies of Fine Arts in Las Palmas, and in the Chair of Drawing and Color of the Schools of Plastic Arts and Design of Gran Canaria and in the Pancho Lasso School of Lanzarote.
He has participated as a speaker in different conferences and congresses of Schools of Plastic Arts and Design. He has also taught courses and corrected texts in the section of Canarian content in the Area of Plastic Arts, aimed at teachers of Early Childhood, Primary and Secondary Education. In artistic-plastic activity, he has participated in more than 65 exhibitions, both individual and collective, distributed not only throughout the Canary Islands and Spain but also in Europe, South America or the USA.
