This project focuses on the relationship between painting and image, in a tension opposed to the concept of expanded painting that has seized attention in recent years. In this show, we want to tackle different strategies involving image from the viewpoint of painting, and oscillating from the direct use of a photographic, cinematographic or media referent, up to the remaking of images taken out of daily personal experience (either affective, intimate or social), history or journalistic chronicle.

A kind of painting in which the echo of the real is not only present, but appears reinforced through a process of image condensation, of referent saturation, ultimately, of essentialization. Frame and colour are turned into essential tools in this process of image remaking, which goes from saturation to decantation: the superfluous is excluded, the anecdotic is concentrated or attention is diverted from it. A descriptive level is subtracted from the image in order to reformulate its meaning by building up a particular density of sense. A kind of painting not relinquishing the documentary aspect of image, but incorporates it, integrates it into an atmosphere that, whereas modifying its duration, its timing (by isolating it from its context and from the flow of images), also transforms its ability to be an icon.

This kind of painting works by drawing from personal experience, connecting reality, either political or historical events, daily atmospheres and scenes or banal objects, with the individual experience, affording the images a category that travels about between the internal and the external, the objective and the subjective, the individual and the social, memory and chronicle ⎯ a kind of painting that talks both of what surrounds us and of what dwells inside.

A painting made up of latent images.

Alberto Martín. 2008