The Surviving Image
Diego Delas, Anna Gonzalez Noguchi & Mia Vallance
The everyday objects that surround us, the popular culture images and major news events that are part of our shared experience, merge to create our group consciousness, a form of cultural memory that resides not in an individual mind but in a common realm.
Made by artists working across mediums and under a diverse range of geographic, political, social, and aesthetic circumstances, the works in The Surviving Image allow to reect not only on their dierences, but also to consider their shared concerns, summoning personal and collective memory and addressing current conditions through the lens of cultural and aesthetic tradition.
As history began to be dened as a discipline, the sense grew that memory was subjective and concerned with the inner life. During the Enlightenment and Romantic period, the concept of memory emerged as something personal and bound up with identity.
Art is an ideal medium for the intimate and confessional, lending itself to diaristic and autobiographical forms. As these artists show, all experience can be manifest in art, whether captured in the moment or recollected in tranquillity. Incorporating references to personal, folk, and collective histories, the works in the exhibition critically reect on the criteria and categories through which recent art-historical memory has been forged.
Co-curated with Marco Galvan
Stemming from her Grandfather's handwritten lyrics of a karaoke playlist that includes 94 minyo songs (Japanese folk songs), Anna Gonzalez Noguchi’s Minyo Playlist series rearticulates the relationship between object and memory, Titled after the corresponding track number, each work is a ne assemblage of stacks of staples arranged in multiple formats and modules. Inspired by the illustrations on the vinyl covers, traditional gures and objects emerge from the engraved surface as a result of an etching process that recalls popular Japanese woodcut. Stationary often appears in Gonzalez Noguchi’s work as an intrinsic, indexical way to organise and remember dierent moments in time.Through a mundane yet intimate support, the series renegotiates memory and the capacity to anchor experience in tangible forms, in a delicate balance between removing and revealing.
In constant erosion and renewal, the layers and signs in Mia Vallance’s paintings are a cipher for memories and emotions that can be frank and poetic, intimate and universal. Like after-images of an experience that remains particularly vivid, her work often alludes to everyday objects and the urban landscape, using acrid and rarefied colours to exemplify the complex relationship between modern society and the natural world. Images are re-appropriated and erased to achieve a layering of coexisting dimensions and events that uctuate on the same plane with a languid, meditative and hypnotic rhythm.The surface of the canvas, such as in Red Moves the Blood (2023) reveals darker elements beneath, oering a new interpretation to abstraction, which is made to appear here not as an art of pure surface but an expression dependent on memory signs.
Diego Delas’ work explores conventions related to remembering, representing and reconstructing the past, materials and ideas. The works in the exhibition, such as Sol Invictus (2019) or Donde Tenga la Cabeza (2019), look at vernacular architectural motifs of Northern Spain that constitute the idea of the house as a familiar body sustained by memories and repetitions, and populated with spells and amulets.
As an architect, artist and researcher, his work revolves around subjective memory and the use of architecture and traditional craft techniques to create complex, layered narratives that explore the intersection of personal and collective experiences. Characterised by the presence of symbols and elements that recall magic realism, the bright hand-sewn banners Agueros de los Nuestros I - III (2015), become manifestos that contribute to a knowledge-creating process aiming to reinterpret a pre-modern culture in regression,
In the gallery space, the works appear like memory glimpses that intertwine to generate new contexts and cultural iconographies, reecting — directly or indirectly — upon the state of the world today, while echoing cultural and historical memories on which societies build their identities.
