Nicolás Franco

About this book

Retrospective of 5 year of artistic production by Nicolás Franco (Chile, 1973) and his vocabulary of photography and painting and its perception. His large scale paintings an assamblages focus, ultimately, on the very process of their creation. Franco rarely captures the images we see in his work. Rather, his procedure is to process and reuse visual objects and printed material, driven by some archivistœs obsession whosepurpose is not obvious.This visual material usually makes some obligue allusion to recognizable cultural, economic, geopolitical and technical processes that marked the course of the twentieth century. These traces are reproduced in Francoœs work from a dispoassionate perspectiva thar oscillates between formalism and conceptualism, forming a material structure where the movement of memory is wrapped by the agencies of the unconscious. As in his previous exhibitions, Nicolás Franco evokes situations distant in time and space: African art, eroticism, colonialism, installation strategies and abstractions, all of which can be gleaned from this set of works that suspend their formal definition and blur the boundaries between photography, painting and sculpture. His work has been exhibited in twelve Museum Solo Exhibitionssuch as the Contemporary Art Museum of Lima; the Contemporary Art Museum of Santiago; National Fine Arts Museum of Santiago; Visual Arts Museum of Santiago; the Barro Museum of Asuncion, and the Blanes Museum of Montevideo. He has participated in group shows in the United States, Latin America and Europe, at venues such as the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; MEIAC Museo Extremeño Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, Badajoz; La Conservera, Ceutí; Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu, Poland; CorpArtes Foundation, Santiago; Wallspace Gallery, New York and De Ateliers, Amsterdam. "This monograph details a number of projects carried out between 2013 and 2017 that involved reproductions of photographs and the transfer of images from one medium to another. These images could be considered in some sense documentary, either because they actually came from archival sources or because they were tracked down in books, films or periodicals where they once served some practical or artistic purpose, attenuated now by the procedures used to restore them."-Page [9]