The Royal Inventories
Spatial installation
Variable dimensions
2022
Presented at ARCO23 Contemporary Art Fair, Espacio Mínimo Gallery, Madrid.
This work is based on a review of the old Royal Inventories and catalogues 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 today is assigned to male painters. Examining these inventories and old catalogues makes us wonder about the validity given to this written record as testimony, since it has not been subjected to the meticulous re-analysis and contrast it deserves. At a conceptual and formal level, the project is configured 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 hidden information and make the invisible visible. In this project, Diana Larrea redrawn the chosen paintings using black charcoal on canvas, thus alluding to the reflectograms obtained with this technique. Larrea’s aim is to establish a symbolic parallel with the infrared technique when she decides to "reveal" the underlying information about these paintings that she has found in the archives and old catalogues. After having searched the aforementioned documents pointing the reviews that indicate the artists as the authors of the paintings, Diana took these texts to make them reappear in white letters on the dark background of these same works. Lastly, the artist wanted to establish a metaphorical relationship with infrared radiation through those objects that are red in the original painting, allowing this to be the only existing color in her proposal.
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