Francisco Medail

Francisco Medail's work can be understood as a weft of questions about photography, about its possibilities as an unstable place of production of meaning and about its expansions in media life. Medail doesn’t take pictures. The central operation that runs through his work consists of designing new assemblies and locations for a universe of existing images, exploring the reverses and edges of their circulation. In this way he inquires about the precariousness of its registry, the fragility of their history and their destiny. These are images that inhabit a space-another, convened according to systematic criteria, either on the formal or discursive level. Medail exercises the transit of a production scattered in peripheral settings towards the aesthetic regime of art. In this traffic of senses, the central questions of his poetics deal with the current visual production of identities, subjectivities and representations. The methodical involvement of already existing images thus seeks to question the current forms of visual production and its capture and treatment by social discourses. "Photographs 1930-1943" (2017) summarizes a view that questions the ways in which historical narratives are constructed and their relationship with the centers of power, in this case an essay on the Argentine Infamous Decade. Other works such as “Extimidad” (2013) refer directly to new devices in the field of photography, where the limits between the public and the private are redefined based on the new uses of the image in the digital era and the new perceptions over the reaches of the body. Through archival poetics, the artist proposes a map on the derivations of the subject in his representation, on the new visibility strategies that have found in intimacy a privileged mode of entertainment.

Submitted by ROLF ART