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ArchiveBorn 1968 in Santiago de Chile, Chile
To frame Francisco Valdés' work in a particular style or medium would draw an artificial enclosure around it and miss its inherent heterogeneity; his pieces explore exchanges between dimensions and means of reproduction rather than an explicit theme. Accordingly, unexpected gestures of resurrection, ingenious acts of appropriation, translation between media and explorations of exorcism abound in them. The artist’s sources are varied too: images taken from eBay, old books, consecrated artworks, Youtube, his personal collection of ghost pictures, and others. All this alludes to Valdés' distrust for unquestioned representations of reality, an attitude that has been described as mixing “suspiciousness towards and flirtation with the double meaning of sophistication”.
The works of the show are constructed upon low-resolution images, a primary source that generates a sort of unstable space, eager to be manipulated. At the other end, the final pieces suggest sensations of temporal displacement, sound, and movement, alongside a recursive system of fictions which subverts apparently secure categories such as “prototype”, “original” or “mass produced”.
 Francisco Valdés, Carpets & Rugs, Lambda Prints, 2008 |
