Appropriating, relocating, transforming and subtracting. “Out of faste” strategies to take advantage of an encounter.
A strong theatrical imprint inhabits each of the compositions that make up Marina Fernández Quiroga’s Defasajes series. From the fortuitous encounter with a box of candy that contained slides with family scenes, belonging to people unknown to the artist, the gesture of appropriation of a pre-existing material led her to mount an operation that would allow her to challenge the limits of this procedure characteristic of current art, in order to reveal her transforming gaze.
Projection was the natural mode of the found photos and their manipulation was initiated by superimposing them on other scenarios, which relocated characters and objects, so that their actions and poses were “forced” to interact with that new location. These stagings updated the original images, reinventing them and bringing them to contemporaneity, not as a simple nostalgic evocation, but bringing them to life and merging them with locations that, in almost all cases, propitiated unusual results of metaphysical edges. Strange disturbances generated by this proposal of times that slide, filter, coincide and intercept, as if it were the manifestation of parallel universes.
The decision to show these “re-photographs” in mural format -whether printed or projected-, completes the transfiguration that the artist set in motion, offering with this kind of presentations the neo-baroque theatricality, which has as its source the visual traps that painting deployed in architecture, liked to plot since Antiquity. This allusion added another temporal layer, no longer by superimposition and formal and significant composition, but by implication, by citing a resource consecrated by the history of art. In addition, as in the painting, the abysmal resource of the photograph within the photograph also functions, another indication of the adherence of this ensemble to the neo-baroque aesthetic.
Finally, the inclusion of the found object -the heart-shaped box, whose characteristics make us conjecture that it treasured fond memories- confronts us with the original trigger of these works, at the same time as it conceals it, when the artist presents the empty frames of the slides, demonstrating with this gesture the definitive metabolization of that which had begun as a discovery full of suggestions, now converted into a categorical creative finding
Gigantogalería Centro Cultural San Martín /16 de abril 2019 – 16 de abril – 2020 / Capital Federal
Curatorship: Karina Acosta
Dionis Palace Museum rooms 1 – 2 – 3– /4 de agosto – 18 de noviembre – 2018 /Córdoba Capital
Curatorship: Adriana Lauría