Guillermo Fernández Toledo exhibits a series of oil paintings inspired by stories seen on Instagram profiles. At the Casa de Pepino Cultural Center.
The stories published on social media have taken the form of a personal diary, a mutant and fleeting daily aleph that feeds the contemporary need to be seen and also the gossipy impulse of those who spend (we spend) a good part of the day and night peering into bits of other people's lives that last 24 hours.
During the pandemic, this collection of images was the catalyst for "Historias," a series of paintings that Guillermo Fernández Toledo is presenting at the Casa de Pepino Cultural Center (Fructuoso Rivera 297). Each work draws on one or more virtual logs, in an exercise of free mimesis, with subjective inlays and the occasional addition of symbolic elements, which retain something of the original image or settle there to fly toward other meanings.
On his Instagram profile, the artist explains the method. The future is analogous, for example, is the confluence of four stories seen on different profiles: a photo of a user who went on vacation and portrayed a scene at sea, a story about the symmetries of natural and human creations, the story of a German painter who saw the figure of a nuclear explosion in a cloud and, finally, a poster that contributed the title: The future is analogous.
A post shared by Guillermo Fernández Toledo (@guillote.guillote)
“Another painter would rescue other images, paint other paintings, follow other people. These paintings are unique and unrepeatable, like the people I follow, and like me. In mine, there will be blurred states of memory, liminal spaces, diffuse realities that merge with dreams, cinematic scenes of a world potentially without us,” Fernández Toledo describes in the text accompanying the exhibition.
The artist worked for a year on this series of more than 30 paintings. A little more than half of them are on display at Casa de Pepino. The exhibition was intended to be a kind of preview from another set of works from the same series that was going to be presented by the Ankara gallery (Colonia Caroya), at the failed Córdoba Art Fair.
One of the rooms was reserved for a "curation" exercise. The painter selected 40 stories and printed them on vinyl, displaying them without any intervention. An installation is also featured, and two QR codes are accessible, inviting you to explore the process behind the paintings.
"Historias" seeks to generate a "personal algorithm." It proposes a journey between formats, between the public and the private, between one's own imagination and the visions of others, and brings the virtual, in its ephemeral form, down to earth in the enduring materiality of oil.
The series also serves as an antidote. “Organically and naturally,” the artist notes, “without speculation, I rescued from oblivion stories of people I know and others I don't know who they are or why I continue, and most likely don't know who I am either. The resulting works don't confront the original image; they are a becoming of it in the form of painting: a defense mechanism against a harsh world, a tool to avoid dying of reality.”
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