Visual Arts Library
After Guernica Series
Artist: Eduardo Medici
Date:
1998
Medium: Mixed media
Dimensions: 180 x 120 cm
Event: Latin American Repression
Motif:
Remembrance
Medici turns photography into a sharp instrument of inquiry of his own personal experience, his own moment and place in history. Knowing that the artist was born in Buenos Aires in 1949 helps the viewer understand one of the central questions in Medici's work: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where do we go? This inquiring title was originally coined by Gaugin for one of his paintings. When he was in his mid-forties, Medici replaced painting with the photographic medium. His more recent work focuses on photographs from a defunct portrait studio with entire canvas surfaces covered with either portraits in their negative state and/or positive contact prints. The picture inside the picture in Medici's work reveals a meditation about humanity. His images inquire into humanity's reasons for its wars, victories or absences. To create his works, Medici takes again the "dirty stuff" of his professor, Luis Felipe Noe's first times: the aggression of Goya in the black paints, but also the scozo of the Mantegna's dead Christ; the popular ex-voto, the contemporary image. Surrounded by miniature stamps, they recall the Middle Ages' predellas or the popular ex-votos realized on newspapers, fabrics and discarded x-rays. Medici observed, "...I also don't know who they were. But did they know who they were?" A state of anonymity emerges. This must have been a blessing during the "Dirty War" imposed by Argentina's military from 1976-84. The horrific events of the military regime are rarely addressed by society at large, but have found their way into Medici's imagery. He has achieved what he deemed important in art: the equilibrium between history and biography. --Irma Arestizabal
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