The painting of Miguel Aguirre (born in Lima, 1973) has as its foundations the analysis of events referring to recent universal history or to occurrences which, on account of their importance, have produced an impact and left a powerful mark on the memory of citizens in our world today.

The iconography of such events generated by their dissemination through the communications media is dealt with by Miguel Aguirre through a reconsideration of their significance via their reformulation by means of a traditional technical procedure as is oil painting, with an entire series of questions coming into play that concern the theory of communication, the sociology of reading, the aesthetics of the reception of audiovisual information or the semiotics and rhetoric of the mass-media and its effects from the viewpoint of traditional painting.

To date, the artist has in general been working along two lines of investigation, two series with the titles Dramatization and DD/MM, respectively, the aim of which is the updating and re-signification of the tradition of historical painting and social events through painting.

The exhibition being held in the gallery is made up of two clearly differentiated parts. On the one hand, the continuation of the series DD/MM, in which violent events in different parts of the world are represented, terrifying images showing the darkest and most violent side of humanity. Initially taken by means of video-surveillance cameras, home videos or recordings taken by mobile phone videos that are flowing around the Internet, our artist takes them over to oil on canvas, faithfully copied, with the prodigious technique of Miguel Aguirre, who uses oil almost without diluting it, from the tube to the canvas, painstakingly, respecting the low chromatic range of the video recordings for Youtube or the poor definition of the mobile phone, using the ancient texture of the paint to demonstrate its capacity to take on contemporary themes, updating its syntax, modifying the significance of its content, awakening our attention by altering its status: from vulgar image, one out of a billion in the improbable flow of the network of networks, to the unique piece, alone, pensive, enigmatic, fascinating on account of its non-determination, orphan and emigrated, the focus now of its own sense, halted in its sleepless wandering. On the screen of a mobile phone one sees a moment of aggression in which four girls attack another in a classroom in Malaga. Another painting copies the image taken by a video-surveillance camera inside the carriage of a train in Catalonia where a youngster is slapping and kicking a young Ecuadorian girl in October 2007. A passenger witnesses the event but he does not help the girl. Another, an image obtained from the video recorded by Chechen terrorists during the kidnapping of parents and children on the first day back at class in a school in Beslan, in September 2004. In the image a boy can be seen with his arms behind his neck and a women looking fearfully at the camera. One can also see the legs of one of the terrorists who is carrying a rifle. These and so many others showing the prodigious barbarity of the human race are transferred via the denouncement of the faithful copyist, the documentary maker, to the chronicle of canvas mounted on frame.

On the other hand, there is the series which gives its title to the exhibition, In memoriam, as homage and memory of the victims of the attack in Madrid that took place on 11 March 2004 (“11-M”), with 22 paintings on paper and a large canvas. The procedure of the artist is first of all to isolate some of the photographs of the victims sent by their relatives and which appeared in a range of articles produced by the newspapers El País and La Vanguardia. These photographs belong to the daily family lives of those who have disappeared, surrounded by their loved ones, in a holiday snapshot or with their favourite pet, showing the most everyday, human and delicate side of those who could have been us. Miguel Aguirre then copies them onto oil on paper, respecting the format of the paper of the periodical and eliminating the published text that accompanied the photos. The ultimate aim of the artist is to search for the genuine background, the soul of the disappeared person, as Roland Barthes described when looking at photographs of his mother following her death: “Starting from her last image, taken the summer before her death (so emaciated, so noble, seated in front of the door of our house, surrounded by my friends), I went back three quarters of a century, and arrived at the image of a girl. So I lost her twice, of course, in her final tiredness and in her first photo, which for me was the last; but also it was then when everything was pivoted and I could at last re-find her as she was in herself” (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida). The series is completed with a large format piece on canvas of the square of Atocha with a tormented sky, threatening and melancholic, over the modernist building of the station.

Taking his Doctorate in Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona, he has held exhibitions in various museums, institutions and galleries in Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Switzerland and Spain. In 2001 he won first prize in the V Plastic Arts Competition of the Fundación Telefónica, Lima, among other distinctions in shows, awards and painting competitions in Peru. Galería Estiarte presented his work at its stand in ARCO 08 and this is his first exhibition in Madrid.