Ayer y Hoy | Yesterday and Today

2013
Archival pigment ink on Canson Edition Etching Rag, 310 g/m
53 parts, each 40.5 x 30 cm.

The Chilean artist Nicolás Franco’s work Yesterday and Today 2013 consists of fifty-three photographic prints that can be arranged in variable configurations including a grid or a straight line. They depict the artist’s experimentation with remnants from the pages of the propaganda photobook Chile: Ayer Hoy (Chile: Yesterday Today), from which the work takes its name. Published in 1975, two years after the military coup in Chile that removed the first democratically elected socialist president in the world, Salvador Allende, the publication is notable for its use of photography and a clean graphic identity to formally represent the benefits of the new regime.

Eyes

2017
Pigment ink, modified acrylic resins and acrylic paint on paper
220 x 152 cm.

Treated Like Flowers

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago 2014
BA Photo. BsAs 2015

El carácter destructivo | The desctructive character

The destructive Buscar character

Scanned 35mm negatives hand transferred to cotton paper
30 parts, variable dimensions

It could happen to someone looking back over his life that he realized that almost all the deeper obligations he had endured in its course originated in people who everyone agreed had the traits of a “destructive character.” He would stumble on this fact one day, perhaps by chance, and the heavier the shock dealt to him, the better his chances of representing the destructive character. The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred. The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenate, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, out of his own condition. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness for destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. It is a sight that affords the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony. The destructive character is always blithely at work. It is Nature that dictates his tempo, indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise she will take over the destruction herself.

Afterall

1998-99
Newspaper cut out, silk paper and red pen
103 parts
Variable dimensions

Circa
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, 2014

By the use of a certain conceptual vagueness and print media, Nicolas Franco brings out the powerful and suggestive effect of his current installation at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. The installation is composed by enlarged, blurry pictures: five black and white digital monotypes on cotton paper. The images, collected from the Historical Museum, offer the duality of two types of landscapes: mountains and silent hills, whose monotonous amplitude reminds us of panoramas of another planet; additional landscapes features caves and rocky areas with unique vegetation, which set out on themselves. The contrast and the total lack of human presence seems to be the appropriate psychological scenario, apt to interpret a, once, famous crime

Una Tarde en el Futuro | Late Evening in the Future

Museo Artes Visuales | 20 May - 17 August 2019
African art, colonialism, surrealist poetics, the strategies of montage and Nicolás Franco's previous work are referred to in this work, the title of which only postpones its comprehension. Lake, voice, greyhound, glass, black, tear, crow, sun, shelter, hut, knife, heart. These are some of the words that the artist regularly arranges on reproductions of the pages of the book "The Universe of Forms, Black Africa" by Michel Leiris and Jacqueline Delance.

In each painting, the words are spread out from one margin to the other and are written in red in a dry wood typeface; their arrangement in the polyptych also obeys a particular distributive logic. The words, then, are partially freed from "inspiration" and instead end up governed by a law, whose imperative, however, is as arbitrary and random as the most feverish poetic language.