SALVADOR DÍAZ

My artistic practice explores the intersections between time, memory, and image through painting. Across various bodies of work, I engage with visual archives—press materials, family photographs, classical artworks, and the surfaces of my own studio—as sources to be reinterpreted and recontextualized. Oil painting serves not only as a medium of representation but as a form of investigation, ethical positioning, and re-signification.

In the Newspapers series, I paint over press articles and headlines to create an aesthetic newspaper library, transforming ephemeral content into enduring visual narratives. Each piece reflects on the fleeting nature of human events, repositioning the news cycle within a slower, contemplative temporality. By intervening directly on newspapers, I give a new character to the event, questioning how information is constructed, perceived, and remembered.

Family Album began one year before in 1997 as a way to recover the disregarded past of my own middle-class family in Mexico City, disrupted by the 1985 earthquake. Working from Polaroid photographs, I translate images of everyday life—school, leisure, family gatherings—into large-scale expressionist paintings. The process becomes one of emotional reconstruction, expanding the truthfulness of photographic memory into a more visceral, painterly language.

In Displacements, I reflect on the role of the artist as observer and traveler. Through visual journals and appropriated fragments of Western art history, I re-situate classical images within my own geographic and cultural experience. These are not citations, but conceptual shifts—acts of empathy, admiration, and reinterpretation. Painting becomes a way to extend the temporality of those images and absorb their humanity into new contexts, and perhaps other kinds of connections to the origin and history of my family album about immigrants from UK and Spain to America. 

With Panoramics, I bring the viewer inside the work itself. These large-scale immersive installations (13 meters long and 2.1 meters high) surround the spectator in a 360-degree visual environment, introducing theatricality and embodiment into the act of seeing. The viewer is no longer just a witness, but an active participant within the pictorial space.

Finally, in Work Tables / Coordinates, I turn inward toward the process of painting itself. These abstract works record the memory of creation—each color line box corresponds to press themes previously painted: security, politics, culture, sport. The table becomes an index of labor and time. Abstraction, in this sense, is not stylistic but archival—a mapping of artistic memory.

My work does not follow the immediacy of trends, but seeks to build a deep temporal architecture around the act of painting. I paint to understand displacement—of image, of memory, of history—and to create spaces where the viewer can contemplate the echoes between the personal and the collective, the visible and the remembered.