The work of Enrique Marty (Salamanca, 1969) draws on a long tradition of painting which is taken over by photography and where the everyday and familiar becomes a genre with its own personality.
Contemporaneity gives way to new turns in this universe, and distances the form between friendly and inclusive in which this theme in art from earlier periods is included. The pictorial project La familia, enters precisely into a double dialogue with the History of Art. On one hand he aligns himself with a trend for the recovery, validity and appropriateness in a broad sense of the baroque. Along this line, the multi-coloured presentation of the nearly three hundred paintings that form the core of the exhibition is revealed.
On the other hand, he uses photography as a primary source for his work. The family album becomes the first iconographic reference where what matters is not the variable aesthetics, but the emotional, affective, biographical and narrative load that embodies the history of the artist's family.
The transfer of photographs to paintings works well for Marty as he can add an equivocal sense of restlessness, where distortion is direct and expressive evidence of the existence of multiple folds that blur the friendly vision presiding over the artistic image of family groups.
Instead, Marty approaches the group portrait in a different way. Instead of presenting a single image, he chooses to reveal a spatial environment, in which each character has its own space. All this refers both to the individual identity of each of the family members, and to the distance -which are close but in some cases insurmountable- that opens up between them.
The alternation between the individual portrait, the scene out of context and the everyday image reaffirm that sense of emotional and psychological distance. The way that the whole painting is shown influences the absence of a linear story, a story of simple connections based on the concepts of identity, memory and belonging. In this way multiplicity and simultaneousness are the protagonists.
In line with the reflection on how these stories are constructed or assumed, Marty shows in the context of the exhibition other everyday objects, which are offered to the spectator so that they can recreate and develop their own references.
Exhibition´s details
Museo Reina Sofía Publications
