As a movie lover there were many classic movies that he loved, but Elvira Palazuelos Blanco he could not avoid a certain unease at seeing over and over the archetypes that were repeated around the woman. “I’m not going to stop liking certain movies because they have sexist content, but I think we have to learn to look at them with a different look,” he explains. That is what he proposes in the exposición CTRL+C/ CTRL +V, in the building of The Sario from the Public University of Navarra (UPNA) until next March 12.
The show was an opportunity to explore the bittersweet sensation that these underlying values produced in her in cinema (not just the classic one), and to see how she related to those productions or to the creators who made them. He had had the idea for a long time, but it was last year when he was able to materialize it thanks to the aid to the visual arts of the Government of Navarra with the Huarte Center, so he was able to do it with the means he needed. For a few years he had already had a collection of captures of images that caught his attention for this reason, then he has been looking for new ones, and as he worked on the project, more appeared to him.
Palazuelos proposes a rereading of that hegemonic aesthetic but from an artistic point of view, which is what she does, specifically through digital collage with a feminist discourse. It is not that he corrects those images inherited from the dominant visual culture, but rather that he contributes others, some “counter-images”, so that each one reinterprets them with a different way of looking at them.
In the collage, Palazuelos goes mixing images of the classics with other advertising, famous paintings, video clips or comics, “All the icons of visual culture that are around and that reach us in a very strong way today, especially through social networks, the Internet, advertising, and how the world we are in is going so fast immersed we cannot stop it, nor does it give us time to reflect, ”explains the artist. That is what she intends: to materialize it on a physical medium, put the different images in relation and allow them to look at each other in a more leisurely way, to discover the messages.
The collages include elements of digital culture, YouTube icons, the Internet, social networks, image processing or movie subtitles. “By extracting certain quotes and relating them to other images, it takes on another meaning, I use them to emphasize that feminist gaze and to generate a certain strangeness in the viewer, or to reflect on the script,” he explains.
All the pieces have in common horizontal and vertical lines and the use of the characteristic color of their plastic language. “I come from working a lot with drawing and installation and I really like modular compositions, very vibrant colors, geometry …”, he locates.
Everything is digital in your workHence the title, CTRL + C / CTRL + V, which refers to the copy and paste functions on the computer. “I have used collage as a technique but also as part of the content, it seems to me that it is a metaphor for our way of seeing, we receive images here and there and we unconsciously relate them to our own experience or to reality or to other fictions ; This short stick reminds me of that, the way we relate to the image today ”, says Palazuelos, a native of Madrid (1984), who after living in Burgos, Paris, Bilbao and Canada, settled in Pamplona ten years ago .
Also due to the weight of the digital image in the making of visual culture, she works with captures or with images captured from the web. “Today the support that comes to us mostly is digital,” he says.
The scenes from Méliès, from Irma la dulce, Metropolis, Vertigo, from the silent cinema or from films from just two years ago, Marlene Dietrich, the mirrors of The Lady from Shanghai, those of Snow White, the frames of Black Swan … site also to plastic works. “The history of painting also interests me a lot because it is part of that imaginary that we have in the West; everything is related: painting, cinema, advertising … ”, he explains.
+ CTRL+C/ CTRL+ V. Elvira Palazuelos. UPNA El Sario Building (C / Sadar, Pamplona). Until March 12. Hours: from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
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