Diana Larrea

Diana Larrea - Real inventories

Biografía del Artista:

9 Digital prints on canvas (70 x 50 cm each). 7 photographic labels (30 x 21 cm each). This project is based on a review of the old Royal Inventories of the Museo del Prado to raise questions about the attributions of some paintings. In these historical archives we find paintings attributed to female artists whose authorship is now assigned to male painters. The examination of these inventories and the old catalogues makes us question the validity that is given to this written record as a testimony, since it has not been subjected to the thorough re-analysis and contrast that it deserves. This artistic proposal does not intend to replace the work of professional art historians, nor to delegitimize the work of anyone, but rather to claim the right and the need to reexamine museum collections from a gender perspective in keeping with the 21st century. If every creative process that we artists go through begins by addressing what we cannot resolve in order to explore it and thus alleviate an internal conflict, then this proposal meets this same need. On a conceptual and formal level, my project is based on the idea of ​​infrared reflectography, a research method used in art restoration workshops. Reflectography is based on infrared light, which allows us to read hidden information, that which is hidden beneath the opaque layers of pictorial pigments. Thanks to this technology, it is possible to view previous designs made before the application of the layers of colour, which were drawn with charcoal, graphite, ink or metal tip strokes on the canvas or board. Taking this concept as a guiding thread, in this project I have redrew the chosen paintings using black charcoal on canvas, thus alluding to the reflectograms obtained with this technique. My aim is to establish a symbolic parallel with the infrared technique when I decide to “reveal” the underlying information about these paintings that I have found in archives and old catalogues. After having scoured the aforementioned documents for reviews that mention the artists as the authors of the paintings, I have taken these texts and made them reappear in white letters on the dark background of these same works. In this way, I establish a reference to the capacity of infrared light to make the invisible visible. Finally, I wanted to propose a metaphorical relationship with infrared radiation through those objects that in the original painting are red, allowing this to be the only existing color in my proposal.