Diana Larrea

Diana Larrea - The Real Inventories

Artist Biography:

 

9 digital prints on canvas (70 x 50 cm each). 7 photographic cartouches (30 x 21 cm each). This project is based on a review of the old Royal Inventories of the Prado Museum to raise questions about the attributions of some paintings. In these historical archives we find paintings attributed to women artists whose authorship is nowadays assigned to male painters. The examination of these inventories and of the old catalogs makes us question the validity given to this written record as testimony, since it has not been subjected to the meticulous re-analysis and contrast it deserves. This artistic proposal is not intended to replace the work of professional art historians, nor to delegitimize the work of anyone, but to reclaim the right and the need to reexamine museum collections from a gender perspective in accordance with the 21st century. If every creative process we artists go through begins by addressing that which we cannot resolve in order to explore it and thus alleviate an internal conflict, then this proposal fulfills this same need. At a conceptual and formal level, my project is based on the idea of infrared reflectography, a research method used in art restoration workshops. Reflectography is based on infrared light that allows to read the hidden information, that which is hidden under the opaque layers of the pictorial pigments. Thanks to this technology, it is possible to visualize the previous designs made before the application of the color layers, which were drawn with charcoal, graphite, ink or metallic tip strokes on the canvas or board. Taking this concept as a guiding thread, in this project I have redrawn the chosen paintings with black charcoal on canvas, in order to allude, in this way, to the reflectograms obtained with this technique. My aim is to establish a symbolic parallelism with the infrared technique when I decide to "reveal" the underlying information about these paintings that I have found in archives and old catalogs. After having traced the aforementioned documents in search of the reviews that mention the artists as authors of the paintings, I have taken those texts to make them reappear in white letters on the dark background of these same works. In this way, I establish a reference to the capacity of infrared light to make the invisible visible. Finally, I wanted to establish a metaphorical relationship with infrared radiation through those objects that in the original painting are red, allowing this to be the only existing color in my proposal.