Salvador Díaz

Salvador Díaz presents his solo exhibition La consistencia del souvenir at Pinacoteca de Nuevo León; a project curated by Virginie Kastel.

What do the family album, which preserves moments of personal history, and newspapers, which, day after day, inform us of the current events of the communities, have in common? This is one of the questions present in Salvador Díaz's artwork, which records the time that is stored in the collective and personal memory through the archives - in the registers of what happened - as tangible proof that time passes over our lives and that events occur. "¿Why is everything to oblivion and not to permanence? To archive something, rather than discard it, destroy it or throw it away; it is the opposite of forgetting it, it is a constant intention to carry into the future a constructed perspective of the reason of our Present."

The fact that this artist always works from something past, whether because it has already been painted, written, photographed, is interesting as his painting dialogues with the tradition of a realism that anticipates a pictorial multiverse; therefore this painting reveals its layers of times in its gesture of being from another time. Painting is a medium that kneads time, and it is this dimension of painting that interests Salvador Díaz, both for the emotional weight it allows to witness and as a remedy against immediacy, the multiple presents that are not experiences but events, pieces of empty meanings that do not stop over time.

Salvador Díaz begins to paint at the moment he selects his mediums: whether using archive photography as a starting point, the history of painting or drawing on selected pages of current events in press: therefore, his artwork is in many ways a commentary on experience and a social portrait.

The commentary is an intellectual action that underlines a dimension of what is observed, be it by irony, compassion or political stance, and in many ways, it shows a commitment to tell or show something. Our political ethics moves between titles, publicity, between denunciation and illustration, in this infinite construction that accumulates in the archives of history, in mountains of printed papers waiting to be read. How does photographic memory affect personal identity? This artwork explores the space of subjective interpretation of archive records and the consistency of the souvenir.

— Virginie Kastel