Ayer y Hoy | Yesterday and Today
2013
Archival pigment ink on Canson Edition Etching Rag, 310 g/m
53 parts, each 40.5 x 30 cm.

Exhibitions:
Tate Modern, London (2019 - 2020)
Cromwell Place, London (2023)
Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid (2020)
Migros Museum, Zurich (2015)
Arco Madrid (2015)

The Chilean artist Nicolás Franco’s work Yesterday and Today 2013 consists of fifty-three photographic prints that can be arranged in variable configurations including a grid or a straight line. They depict the artist’s experimentation with remnants from the pages of the propaganda photobook Chile: Ayer Hoy (Chile: Yesterday Today), from which the work takes its name. Published in 1975, two years after the military coup in Chile that removed the first democratically elected socialist president in the world, Salvador Allende, the publication is notable for its use of photography and a clean graphic identity to formally represent the benefits of the new regime.

Eyes

Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago 2014
Exhibicion Beca AMA - Gasworks

Treated Like Flowers

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago 2014
BA Photo. BsAs 2015

Le Magasine d ´ Education et Recreation (Godot)

ArtBasel Miami Beach OVR
Aninat Galeria (2020)

Una Tarde en el Futuro | Late Evening in the Future
Materia Gris | Grey Matter
2018
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.

Circa
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Parque Forestal, 2014

By the use of a certain conceptual vagueness and print media, Nicolas Franco brings out the powerful and suggestive effect of his current installation at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. The installation is composed by enlarged, blurry pictures: five black and white digital monotypes on cotton paper. The images, collected from the Historical Museum, offer the duality of two types of landscapes: mountains and silent hills, whose monotonous amplitude reminds us of panoramas of another planet; additional landscapes features caves and rocky areas with unique vegetation, which set out on themselves. The contrast and the total lack of human presence seems to be the appropriate psychological scenario, apt to interpret a, once, famous crime.

El carácter destructivo |
The desctructive character
2000

scanned 35mm negatives hand transferred to cotton paper
30 parts, variable dimensions

The destructive Buscar character consist on 12 analog photographs taken in 1999 in Ecuatorial Guinea. These images are shown in negative and are juxtaposed and accompanied by a Walter Benjamin text The Destructive Character.

It could happen to someone looking back over his life that he realized that almost all the deeper obligations he had endured in its course originated in people who everyone agreed had the traits of a “destructive character.” He would stumble on this fact one day, perhaps by chance, and the heavier the shock dealt to him, the better his chances of representing the destructive character. The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred. The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenate, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, out of his own condition. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness for destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. It is a sight that affords the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony. The destructive character is always blithely at work. It is Nature that dictates his tempo, indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise she will take over the destruction herself.

The destructive character sees no image hovering before him. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space – the place where thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without occupying it. The destructive character does his work; the only work he avoids is creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy. The destructive character is a signal. Just a trigonometric sign is exposed on all sides to the wind, so he is exposed to idle talk. To protect him from it is pointless. The destructive character has no interest in being understood. Attempts in this direction he regards as superficial. Being misunderstood cannot harm him. On the contrary, he provokes it, just as oracles, those destructive institutions of the state, provoked it. The most petty bourgeois of all phenomena, gossip, comes about only because people do not wish to be misunderstood. The destructive character tolerates misunderstanding; he does not promote gossip.

The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.

The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is worthing living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

* Text published originally in the Frankfurter Zeitung at 20th November 1931.
Walter Benjamin (Berlim, 1892). Philosopher. Literary Critic. Sociologist. Translator. Wrote among others The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Theses on the Philosophy of History and the unfinished work The Arcades Project. Committed suicide while running away from the Nazi Secret Services in 26 September 1940 in Portbou, Spain

The destructive character is the enemy of the étui-man. The étui-man looks for comfort, and the case is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction.
The destructive character stands in the front line of traditionalists. Some people pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them; others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive.The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself.

Afterall

1998-99
Newspaper cut out, silk paper and red pen
103 parts
Variable dimensions