Hommage – Issues of auto-referentiality and reproducibility [FERNANDOFERNANDEZOROZCOJOSECLEMENTEOROZCODIEGORIVERA] points to the underlying conditions of reference’s production in the artistic process through the dissection of elements of representation from recognizable or familiar Mexican painters to play with both authorship ambiguity and representational potentiality of the original painting to function as an alternative decor for a new composition. By creating a shift of medium, from the painting –unique- to the technical reproduction of the “edited” source, Hommage – Issues of auto-referentiality and reproducibility [FERNANDOFERNANDEZOROZCOJOSECLEMENTEOROZCODIEGORIVERA] creates a space of distortion where some elements of the main characteristics of the original painting are converted into a motive, purely decorative in the new composition as if the repetition in series of the original could alter the originality of the image itself to turn it to a pattern in which those elements define a new image. The superposition of different sourced elements within a same image reveal a new aesthetics, almost purely ornamental where the familiarity of the original images remain, stressing the ambiguity and the limits of inspiration by reducing the composition to a series of limited color features, a series of forms and a direct superposition of original sourced elements in a reimagined landscape without modifying totally the painting used as a reference.
If Hommage – Issues of auto-referentiality and reproducibility [FERNANDOFERNANDEZOROZCOJOSECLEMENTEOROZCODIEGORIVERA] explores questions of representation, references and ways of quoting that depict a certain “natural” artistic style (since all elements, although from different sources, can “fit” together as “natural” in the new composition) in a way that this particular depiction speak to a specific cultural context (the agave and the volcanic landscape of Mexico) in which the construction of artistic identity could oscillate between hommages, influences, cultural context and the formulaic way artists work today with almost unlimited digital access to images. The natural forms and landscape depicted in (title) and their reproduction in series are alternatively a certain examination of the naturalistic construction of (artistic) identity and the adulteration of originality to conform to a certain-self-perceived aesthetics. The reproduction of the image altered -through the technically manipulated reproduction- reveals ways of processing, filtering and organizing information and ultimately question with lucidity the illusionistic and complicated way to create original images and ideas from a combined array of literal sources.