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Categories / Conceptual Photography / Photomontage /Tags / Argentina / conceptual photography / mixed media / photographic oil painting / Portraiture / South America / Click here to open comments section, click again when done to close / Comments Off

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Photographic oil paintings are hypnotic. The patina of paint is like a false veil behind which lurks death: there is a sense of evasion, as when applying make-up to a corpse prior to viewing. It is a trans-vested genre where the subject is further removed from reality by an additional mask. The photographic image is thus disguised by a technical mixture, but the result is still a hybrid inspiring a particular symbolic tension: that which is intended to be hidden remains present, and what is feigned will never actually happen.

In theoretical terms, the process of ‘de-automation’ produced by the pictorial layer adds a certain distance to the otherwise immediate relationship between photographer and subject; it is a distance inherent to the aura which, according to Walter Benjamin, is experienced in the presence of unique works of art. But when we think about it in relation to death, as this was the traditional and ultimate purpose of the genre—it seems that the effect sought is quite different: an effort to draw the loved ones closer by disguising the loss, to bring the image back to life through the painting, and simultaneously, as the original context of the portrait vanishes over time, to endow the memory of the loved ones with an air of eternity. These characteristics are diametrically opposed to the essential death-time duality of photography as posed by Roland Barthes: the emphasis on death as something arising from the temporal characteristics of the photographic medium itself, or, in other words, the mechanical repetition ad infinitum of something that happened once and can never again be repeated in existential terms. This dichotomy is not resolved in photographic oil paintings, death and time remain suspended, but not entirely; they hang, ethereal, tightening the hypnotic wire of tension vibrating taut between photography and painting, instance and eternity, immediacy and distance, life and death.

Sacred immortality

It is true that as far as society goes, no middle-class family living in the first half of the 20th century in Argentina would have considered these issues when preparing to spend large amounts of money on photographic oil paintings. Their intention was undoubtedly to render homage to their loved ones with a tribute of some distinction (greater than a photographed portrait, but not as expensive as an original oil painting) and, on certain occasions, to ensure that the memory of the deceased continue present in their daily lives, to the point where the portrait was transformed into something far more than mere representation, imbued with something akin to sacred immortality.