Materia Gris | Grey Matter
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes 2023

Judith & Laura

2023
Hydrochloric acid 16%, asphalt paint, pigment ink, thinner, beeswax, offset printing and acrylic on 2mm natural aluminum panels mounted on wooden frames.
300 x 330 cm. | 118 x 130 inches

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.

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.

Benditas Ruinas | Beautiful Ruins
2019

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.

Parcours D ´Incidents
2019- ongoing

Pigment ink, offset printing, acrylic, paper and muriatic acid on aluminium.
192 x 150 cm.
All Unique.

Personal anthology and recent work blend together in Parcours d'Incidents, a series of works that began in 2019 and continues to date.  Devoted to montage techniques, the artist works with his trajectory, as a film director would in the editing room, combining works that are snippets and fragments from previous lives, both his own and those of his main interests, familial and artistic. The whole gives new perspectives to those familiar with the artist's work. For those who do not yet know him, it is a good opportunity to see a particular summary of his career.

Parcours D ´Incidents (Onlooker)
2019- ongoing

Pigment ink, offset printing, acrylic, paper and muriatic acid on aluminium.
192 x 150 cm.
Unique.

Primeras Letras | First Letters
2017

LIMAC - Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima
08.08 - 22.10, 2017

Hacer Mundos | Worldmaking
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes 2017

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)

Misfit (Güila)

2017
Pigment ink, acrylic resins, acrylic paint, polyethylene film, cotton paper, red pen, graphite, silk paper, adhesive and magnets on aluminum.
300 x 700 cm | 118,1 x 275,6 in

Expanded Printer Matter

2017
Pigment ink, modified acrylic resins, acrylic paint and muriatic acid on aluminum mounted on paper
220 x 152 cm.
Private Collection, Berlin,

Eyes

2017
Pigment ink, modified acrylic resins and acrylic paint on paper
220 x 152 cm.

Treated Like Flowers

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

El carácter destructivo | The desctructive character

Pigment ink hand transferred to cotton paper
30 parts, variable dimensions

Circa
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, 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

Afterall

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

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.

La imagen y su doble | The image and its double

In The Image and Its Double,[1] Franco uses a twin audiovisual projection to set off some sequences from Buñuel’s documentary against other images in which similar but not identical compositions work like formal rhymes. These come from the great archive now constituted by new public media such as YouTube, Vimeo and Shutterstock, which provide a platform for audiovisual material largely produced by anonymous amateurs. The unintentional visual “replicas” of Buñuel’s film thus tracked down and edited by the artist include images produced in Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Ecuador, Chile, the United States, Spain, Lebanon, Kenya and Nigeria. By thus conflating images, Franco’s installation progressively depicts the boundaries and byways of a succession of wretched Hurdes whose limits are, in this case, those of an Internet-connected world. A universe of documentary forms of the most varied provenance and authorial quality thus recompose the storyboard of Buñuel’s Land without Bread and project it on to a ubiquitous present. Punctuating the double images like refrains are stills of a mountainous region (Extremadura is mountainous) and slow-motion pictures of a cockerel’s flapping wings which, in their solid 4K red-filtered clarity, show up the aged and worn cinematographic and home-recorded visual material they contrast with. The deterioration of the image, brought into relief by the high definition that interrupts the flow from time to time, introduces into the piece a meditation on the increasing deployment of technology that modulates, transforms and reorganizes the visual experience—an evocation of the technical history of the image that is crucial when images of history are considered.

Genero Negro

Strictly speaking Genero negro (Black Cloth – 2009) illuminated the empty museum space, blocking out with a theatrical structure what could be the “heir” of Malevitch’s naked icon, the “solar eclipse” that forces us to confront the construction of a world from the barbarity of experience, that is to say, to begin anew with a tabula rasa.

Una Fiesta Extraña y Bárbara (Parte I) |

NN: Encuentros solitarios con cuerpos melancólicos | NN: Lonesome Encounters with Melancholic Corpses 2015 - Ongoing

Hen House | Chromatic aberrations & small intestines

2014
4k video, color, silent, 2 min. 13 sec.
Video 4k, color, sin sonido, 2 min. 13 seg.

Mellizas

Museo de Artes Visuales, 2014

Mellizas

2014

Silkscreen ink on stainless steel mounted on concrete plinth | Serigrafía sobre acero inoxidable montada en plinto de concreto
2 Parts, each 25,5 x 17,7 x 15,7 inches
2 partes de 65 x 45 x 40 cm. c/u

Goldberg

2015
4k Video
39 min. 19 sec
5.1