La Dernière-garde

For centuries, paintings and drawings made ​​us witnesses of historical events. Since the advent of photography, film, television and, more recently, internet, this responsibility changed hands and history paintings passed to the dernière-garde (the last guardian).

This exhibition of Miguel Aguirre renews the role of painting in relation to visual media bombardment.

Images of conflicts face their observers to a fatality: away from framing an event the image is fragmented, unrecognizable. Below this multitude of images reality flattens its relief. Very often, this tragedy is trapped in its bi-dimensionality and erased by a fierce and immediate accumulation.

The strength of Miki Aguirre´s work finds itself in an area where reality and fiction reinterpret our visual consumption. The paintings establish a space that demands to contemplate and respond to a our deviated routine.

The selected works show images from the daily press. The serie entitled Pieces consists of newspaper images painted at the same size of their publication. The DD / MM  paintings were made out of press images of violent acts captured with cellular phones or security cameras and remain faithful to their specific chromatic resolution.  The serie includes large format paintings as well as others made to the original size of the newspaper with their surrounding text erased.  The exhibition concludes with the In Memoriam serie that portrays the victims of the Madrid March 11th 2004 bombing after pictures that appeared in El País and La Vanguardia newspapers.

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To continue this exhibition you can visit the Rest in Press Archive which focuses on the use of the daily printed press in contemporary art.