FERNANDO BRYCE

Fernando Bryce is an artist whose work focuses on memory, through series of drawings which reproduce archive images and documents in order to offer alternative historical narratives and non-linear perspectives on history, thus allowing us to re-evaluate the present. At the end of the 1990s, Fernando Bryce gave up painting to concentrate on drawing and to develop a body of work based on what he calls ’the mimetic analysis method’, which means making ink copies of a series of photographs, newspaper cuttings, advertisements, promotional material or popular propaganda, among other documents, taken from archives and libraries. Bryce’s work offers a new perspective on history and uncovers the univocal discourses of the prevailing powers. Bryce claims a new image by mimetically copying documents, statistical maps, bureaucratic reports, pamphlets and, at the same time, converts the image into a new kind of ’writing’, a graphology which reveals a web of relationships within a specific historical case. This artistic strategy has a critical and ethical intent. Despite the seeming objectivity of his series, the literal transcriptions of documents and images, and the material he selects, reveal what is hidden: from recovering forgotten stories to exposing, with irony, the official discourses of power. Bryce pursues the strategy Walter Benjamin ascribed to the chronicler in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History"; that is, the artist narrates without differentiating between major and minor events. In this stringing-together, which from a later, historical point of view must seem a random approach, there lies a political expectation: that nothing that happens is ever lost for history. Every new arrangement and selection is an interpretation of the facts that, in turn, are constantly being revised by history.

 

Born in Lima in 1965, Fernando Bryce currently lives and works between Lima and Berlin. His work has been shown at, amongst others, the Fundación Tapiès (Barcelona), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Castello di Rivoli (Rivoli/Torino), MOCA (Los Angeles) and IVAM (Valencia) and can be found in important collections such as that of the MOMA (New York), Tate Modern (London), MUSAC (León) or the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh).

Dit evenement is onderdeel van Algo Más Que Palabras / Something More Than Words