Filtered images
"A good artist copies, a great artist steals"
Pablo Picasso
A social function of art is to mediate in the man-system relationship through the presentation of the former to the latter. Walter Benjamin points out that art, in essence, has always been reproducible either through simple imitation, or with the support of technology, but the reproduction of works of art has always been possible; historically art students have always learned by imitation. Every work has its influences, his bet is not only understanding but also the transformation of reality.
Although the pictorial work of Miguel Angel Ricardez is based on the appropriation of mainly baroque art images, reproduced from mobile devices, his works do not arise to represent reality through an image, but to re-contextualize previous works, of other eras, creating new narratives based on the color and abstraction of these filtered images, sometimes distorted by the quality of the image that the net throws at us.
The exposure of the artist Miguel Angel Ricardez to European classical art, during his stay in Italy, led him to develop and rescue traditional Renaissance painting techniques that today are the basis of his pictorial exercises,
In the words of Ricardez, This project intends to consciously reflect and express historical styles and at the same time, exaggerate the physical perception of painting through plastic, historical and conceptual antagonisms.
Although Walter Benjamin tells us that even in the most perfect of reproductions, one thing is left out of it: the here and now of the work of art, its unique existence is there in that place where it is, says the author of The Work of art at the time of its technical reproducibility.
In the work of Miguel Angel Ricardez, the work itself takes on a unique almost ritual aura, where the appropriation of the work is only a pretext to bring to the canvas an explosion of color loaded with movement.
Indira Sanchez Tapia