Azucena Vieites, aspiration to break

Madrid,

This same morning Azucena Vieites has received the National Graphic Art Award from Marta Rivera de la Cruz, delegate of Culture, Tourism and Sports of the Madrid City Council, and tomorrow will open to the public at the Royal Academy of San Fernando, where that ceremony has taken place, the exhibition that accompanies the award.

A jury formed by Ángeles Albert, general director of Cultural Heritage and Fine Arts; Nekane Aramburu, director of the Apel.LES Fenosa Foundation; and Yolanda Romero, Chief of the Conservatader Division of the Bank of Spain, decided to grant the artist of Hernani the greatest recognition granted in the field of graphic creation in Spain by the role it has given to the resources of multiplicity, reproduction and copy when addressing in their work issues such as practices Low-Fi (That aesthetic that suggests nostalgia from the evocation of the past and the deliberate imperfection), gender activism and the strategies of current visual culture, in terms of their speeches and the way to send them.

From a selection of representative compositions of different moments of her career, this exhibition underlines how the author has served the parameters imposed by graphic language to investigate the communicative possibilities and critical capacity of the images, taking them to the thematic field that most interests her: that of feminism, punk and current of the current of the Do it yourself. One of his slogans is precisely the message of the Riot Grrrls he says: If you don’t like what is around you, change it, do it yourself.

Azucena Vieites. Let's play prisoners, 1993-1997

Vieites are questioning that the search for perfection in the technical maintains its validity as a necessary condition to move the viewer; She opts to disturb him by offering visual “products” that have nothing to do with unique and closed scenes, when structured as sequences that disassemble the usual narrative logic, and that do not obey the yearning for virtuosity; Nor when demonstrating the professionalism of a trade.

Their works are clearly related to each other, in their essences, but they are renewed from appointments, appropriation, exams of the ties between the original and the copy, incursions in what implies reappropriation and references to feminism and gender policies associated with subcultures. For that reason, it does not usually create from scratch but from images taken from art and fashion magazines, record covers, fanzines, photographs, posters, banners …, which reelabates and submits repetitions, seriations and seriations, seriations and remakes in order to reveal the cultural plots from which they come and in which they derive.

In the repetition effect, the represented fades, it is distorted. The image is constructed from that repetitive effect that exceeds one’s representation and thin.

Few of these works are complete in themselves: they do not suggest definition or integrity, but are part of fragments constellations; In them he has been plunged since, thirty years ago, he joined the Erreakzioa-Reaction collective and began to use economic and easy access materials, such as photocopies or cards, and procedures such as drawing, collage or screen printing to find out how far the fence and reinterpretation could take it.

Value in this last medium, very present in the Academy exhibition, its ability to raise an unsuspected astonishment from the insistence, and the same purpose has transferred it to its videographic creations, close to the video clip: Serigraphy allows me to obtain an image over and over again, this technique makes us think about the idea of the original, the copy, the unique, serial or reproducible work. In the repetition effect, the represented fades, it is distorted. The image is constructed from that repetitive effect that exceeds one’s representation and thin. From my point of view, a reason for being of artistic practice has to do with the ability to cause strangeness.

We will see in the exhibition numerous young people, rarely in full body, in their creations. There is a reason: their natural inclination to gesture their own language and its disappointment to the norms, qualities to which it considers vieites, artistic practices should always aspire.