Born in 1957 in Ferrol (SP)
Lives and works in Paris (FR)
1992
Colour photograph, cibachrome
127 x 160 cm
Year of Purchase: 1994
In the well-lit room of a museum, an armed female guard aims her flashlight at the disguised stranger preparing, in the dark, to make off with the unfinished canvas of a famous painter. This is the simple story which acts as a theme for this set of photos. Now, behind these characters and circumstances befitting a police comedy, a twofold and most unusual spectacle reveals itself: one, dazzling with colours, which belongs to the daytime; one, in black and white, which falls under night-time activity, as if added on to the former.
But there is no trickery or laboratory artifice in this snapshot. The film which the sentry seems to illuminate is an extremely simple anamorphosis of painted marks, visible, incidentally in the surveillance mirror; the skin of this caricature of a thief is, for its part, covered with thick theatrical make-up. For a few traces of paint applied to the floors, walls and flesh of the actress are all the matter needed to inlay a colourless photograph in a colour snapshot.
The fact that pictorial means are thus used for apparently photographic ends is not the least of the paradoxes in this piece. The artist was beyond any doubt less concerned with serving photography than with destroying the credibility of this latter by here formulating a doubt about this representative fidelity with which it is elsewhere excessively credited. It is not willy-nilly that, in order to reveal certain representative illusions of an allegedly scrupulous technique with regard to reality, the tried and tested means of an ancient know-how should be called upon, know-how which, under the name of painting, the birth of photography condemned to outmodedness.