Leo de la O

Chronicle / Crónica

Painting - 2017
Unique
Mixed media on canvas
145 x 170 cm
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Artwork Statement

From digitally and pictorially manipulated photographs my work materializes. It is an aesthetic discourse in which he uses snapshots as a documentary element to cast a reflection on individual memory and memories. It is an experience that I articulate as a sort of trial and reflection on the associative and comparative capacity of the subject.
My creative process starts from the visual memory of family and friends who have made trips abroad. By juxtaposing images of transcendental places inside and outside Cuba, I recreate a supposed ideal space where past and present coincide in an idyllic terrain that works as a reservoir of the best experiences of those people. The final work is a totally decontextualized photograph that intervenes pictorially with strong brushstrokes to emphasize the space-time contamination that it has once been.
It is a visuality that moves between the abstract and the neofigurative. Paradoxes, ruptures, misunderstandings and bizarre mixtures that cross the (re) construction of memory. The multiple photographic and pictorial layers are a kind of superimposed presents, a reflection of the functioning of memory and an emphasis on the temporal relationship that acquires meanings in function, not of a chronological order, but hierarchical and selective.
I develop a seductive mechanism for the (re) invention of experience: ambiguous images, blurred, but to which the viewer is attracted. I carry out an archeology of the present, acting on imaginary strata; In this way I overcome the habitual link with time and provoke other readings of reality.
All these modes of fusion and relationship, the interest to blur the limits of life, to make what is far away close and the everyday recorded, to make it easier for everyone to be an actor in this story, start from the globalized and multicultural social substratum. that conditions the world of today and that is expressed with all propriety as a resource of insertion in the contemporary visual tradition