O Futuro da Actualidade

Like Francesc Ruiz, Pauline Fondevila and Cisco Jiménez, the Mexican painter Salvador Díaz (Mexico City, 1977) also employs a deeply personal filter as a reaction against avalanche of information coming from the press and the conventional media Macchine. In Díaz’s case, his strategy consists of using as a support a number of printed media in order to relate his drawings and automatic paintings to the news that fill the pages of our daily newspapers.

Salvador Díaz’s work is accumulative and is shaped as a kind of uncontainable reaction – one in wich he gives a free rein to his visceral urges – to the deluge of advertising imagery, endless sequences of political and corporate images, the non-stop catastrophes, wars and conflicts on a world scale. On the one hand, his work represents a highly peculiar way of reading the press (as he superimposes his own, iconic reading of reality) and of reacting against it, as his drawings end up as an emotional register of his reactions, fits of anger, daydreams and personal drive.

Through automatic writing and an uncontrollable need to impose his presence on the wider media presence, Díaz constructs a vast and complex mural in which he mixes a wide variety of advertising and information, an essential record of his ghosts and fears, a collective imaginariaum created from his insistence and the ubiquitous nature of certain press images and the small, insignificant way in wich we personalize, customize and digest them, making everything that the media serve up for us on a daily basis something personal.

Manuel Olveira

Director of CGAC Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea