La Sábana | The sheet
2017

Exhibitions: Presente. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago (2023); La Sabana. Parque Cultural de Valparaíso (2018); La Sábana. MAM - Museo de Arte Moderno de Chiloé (2018); La Sábana. Espacio Confluencia, FAD, Mendoza (2018); La Sábana. Museo de Arte Moderno de Chiloé, Chiloé (2018); La Sábana. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Valdivia (2017); La Sabana, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago (2017)

The ties that may link Nicolás Franco’s work of art The Sheet with the painting of History – the indisputable great genre during the era of academic and bourgeois art – are barely imaginable from some of the features that survive in its format as well as the impact generated by its imposing presence, somewhat reminiscent of the conception of a monument. At first glance, nothing about this work of art is comparable to figurative discourse nor to the narratives of emblematic works of art of that old conspicuous pictorial genre that in other times had the function of portraying memorable and noteworthy events in the form of images. However, the painting The Sheet positions us before a surface in withdrawn self-absorption, that has retreated towards a material intensity where no event, other than the dynamics of form, is discernible. 

At first sight we encounter this work as if in a street, facing a fragment of wall, peeling from rain and sun, on which posters and slogans have been pasted and subsequently torn off, many times. Yet, this wall is confined by the picture’s boundaries, hanging in the art exhibition space, and positions us in the condition of spectators of something that, at a glance, appears to be the echo of 20th century abstract art. 

Enclosed and focused on its materiality, or a simulation of something weathered by time that confronts us from its initial impact, this picture experiences a transformation and an aperture as we approach it and the enigmatic marks on its surface appear before our eyes. These are not marks that an easel painter would make, but rather marks that rely on the random way they are affixed. These marks speak of transfer processes, of translation from photographic image to pictorial space, and, in that sense, of technical operations mediated by chemical thinners and printing mechanics.

Two layers comprise the visual fabric that materializes as we come closer to the painting The Sheet. Towards the bottom of the painting, photographic proof strips, recognizable by their perforated edges, come in view, in a framework of strangeness, placid moments of one or several biographies and generations, perhaps united by those random determinants that may constitute a family. On a more superficial level, a manuscript taxed to an unspeakable degree by enlargement, detains and disturbs our visual course, intervening the painting like a veil: a cloth with a grid is adhered on top of the first photographic layer, like clothing on bodies submerged in water. Concealing and at the same time displaying the bottom photographic layer, this surface weft occasionally frames the fragmented appearance of a face, an arm, crossed legs, a number of objects on a shelf, arranged like still life. 

This painting appears precisely to be a visual weaving in which the first plane and the last one intersect, and are united by small, intense blue specks, preventing any from either touching bottom or standing out. Everything in this image is shape and form, thanks to the interfacing (not dissolution) of the visual layers that comprise it,
in dynamics that only cease in one corner — a haven that appears in our sight, allowing us to rest and take shelter — where the splendid figure of a boy with his mother becomes clearly visible, in a photographic representation, infused in the past tense. Taut and questioned by this play of entries and exits, of small, fleeting events of shape and form that weave this painting’s visual network, differed and interrupted encounters with historic and social memory emerge. Handwritten phrases that can be seen between the material folds of each surface layer foster this encounter. Occasionally, these phrases gain footing from information and words such as “witness,” “civil,” “case,” “vehicle,” or “taken” mired in short, urgent expressions that speak of crime and danger. Something sinister is about to happen or is happening in the temporal order of the immobile documentation that extends on the foreground, whose roughness contrasts with the warm texture of photos from the family album that speak through their interstices.

The manner in which this image is materially comprised is fundamental in producing a discourse on memory that gives rise to form or, rather, resists from its markedly material and procedural emphasis, the possibility of “making an issue” of History. In the exhibition hall, the artist has placed indications of the visual elements he worked with. These elements are family and social registries: the copy of a rustic manufactured spreadsheet for organizing and cross-referencing data in the context of humanitarian resistance to the dictatorship, and the strips of photographic proofs from his own family album, the album of a family that did not directly suffer state violence but coexisted with it, like so many other families, experiencing the upheaval or indifference of daily life, like a fissure buried in biographical and intimate space. 

Although The Sheet’s primary resource is photographic reproduction that the artist has enlarged and reproduced onto a transparent film to transfer them to the canvas, the images’ capacity for reproduction has been unfailingly halted there: its effect is as the imprint created by a monotype, in other words, an anti-matrix. Randomness has had a hand in creating the imprint, giving the image a specific identity, in the way in which history and political violence left an unreproducible mark, depending on randomness and circumstance, on every individual who to this day carries in his or her body, speech, legacy, as well as a community organized around its lacerations. The way the painting originally adhered to the transparent plates “unglued” over the canvas in a process whose randomness was paradoxically “managed” by the artist, cannot possibly occur under identical conditions ever again.

In this work Franco imposed the problem represented by not being able to or wanting to merely recount, exalt, or denounce catastrophic events that shook the 20th century with those to which his artistic project has been intrinsically associated, during many years. Following the path of certain pictorial photographic movements, such as those developed by the German painter Gerhard Richter — mindful of the ways in which small photographic events may come to constitute a history of History, if linked like an atlas — who brings his documentary material to a stage where they readily transform into data of another situation, or they have an impact and an experience in a sensible, non-conscious way, not susceptible of becoming an object of study. In this work of art, the death of the painting of History, in the hands of precisely historic events that exceded the basic rules of the genre, bringing it to the brink of extinction, is what to some extent is portrayed by a rusty, collapsed image, whose modes of signification no longer have any connection to narrative order. And, yet, it does not give up on history. In fact, it seeks sources from historians and biographers, and from them traces an experience that is only possible in the material literalism of the image. The literalism here is nothing less than the coarse, encrusted or subtle marks — practically transparent, at times — that, through their impossibly replicable, indomitably singular, form emulates works that always exist in memory.