Benditas Ruinas | Beautiful Ruins
2019
MAVI - Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago.

The photograph of a 1.8-million-year-old skull of a human being ancestor is the point of departure for the work that Nicolás Franco will present at the MAVI. Beautiful Ruins features artist’s work produced specifically for the museum. Over the last ten years, Nicolás Franco has explore diverse ways of revealing gaze and history through images. Central to his work is the relation between the universe of collective memory and everyday experience, together with an expansion of the vocabulary of photography and painting and its perception. His large scale paintings and assamblages focus, ultimately, on the very process of  their creation.

As in his previous exhibitions, Nicolás Franco evoke 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 formal definition and blur the boundaries between photography, painting and sculpture.

Una Tarde en el Futuro | Late Evening in the Future

Una Tarde en el Futuro | Late Evening in the Future

Museo Artes Visuales | 20 May - 17 August 2019
African art, colonialism, surrealist poetics, the strategies of montage and Nicolás Franco's previous work are referred to in this work, the title of which only postpones its comprehension. Lake, voice, greyhound, glass, black, tear, crow, sun, shelter, hut, knife, heart. These are some of the words that the artist regularly arranges on reproductions of the pages of the book "The Universe of Forms, Black Africa" by Michel Leiris and Jacqueline Delance.

In each painting, the words are spread out from one margin to the other and are written in red in a dry wood typeface; their arrangement in the polyptych also obeys a particular distributive logic. The words, then, are partially freed from "inspiration" and instead end up governed by a law, whose imperative, however, is as arbitrary and random as the most feverish poetic language.