Work in progress, 2006

Author: Fernando Bryce

Series 80 of drawings.

Ink on paper.

30 x 21 cm.

Bryce reflects critically and unsettlingly on the most recent past, reinterpreting its images. Much of the world’s history is there, printed on paper, in newspapers, advertising brochures and books, resting in oblivion. Bryce rescues the past and updates it, reinterprets events and people, using what he calls the “mimetic analysis method”. This method consists of touching up images, photographs and drawings taken from these documents to modify the message.

Bryce uses press clippings, political pamphlets, books whose images transmit messages that have something to say to modern society and he modifies them, always respecting the original content. He eliminates the excess and keeps what is essential. His goal is to modernise the messages to denounce the forgotten rules, the myths and truths disseminated in the past. He proposes a new reading of the history that time has distorted, and in doing so, exposes the reality whose images lie dormant between silence and obscurity.

His work does not produce fresh images but rather strips the past printed on paper, highlighting the ideas he wishes to convey to give the viewer a different perspective. He retrieves forgotten images and text and inserts them into the present day. His methodology is reminiscent of the work of famous artists identified in the pop current, although he goes even farther. He does not merely reproduce existing images. Rather, using simple drawings in Chinese ink he recreates those images, infusing them with the feeling and warmth of the political commitment that alerts viewers to the fact that they need merely look to the past to understand that the manipulation of power is alive and well.