Painting from "Lives between pages" series
"Lives between pages" is a series of works created from archival magazines and newspapers found in my grandmother’s apartment, which she had collected over the years as a record of everyday life and the passage of time. While organizing the space, I began cutting out individual elements from them — fragments of figures, interiors, and objects — intuitively combining them into new compositions. These collage arrangements became the basis for paintings, which I then developed digitally through photographs of the cut-outs, elements of my own drawings, and fragments of private photographs.
The whole was brought together in a graphic design program and transformed in such a way as to blur the boundary between document, fiction, and personal archive. I then repainted the final compositions in oil on canvas, giving them materiality and painterly coherence, while leaving only traces of the collage behind.
The series explores the contrasts embedded in human everyday life — differences in ways of living, experiences, and realities of people functioning under different social, cultural, and geographical conditions, as well as the general strangeness of life.
"Margin of Error" depicts a woman resembling a model at the height of her career, placed within an aesthetic, architecturally harmonious setting with which she appears to blend perfectly on a visual level. The composition creates an impression of luxury, control, and image-based perfection; however, on both sides of the figure appear graffiti photographed by me in poor districts of Argentina. These elements introduce a clear dissonance — two worlds existing side by side, yet deprived of any real possibility of coexistence.
The unnaturally cut-off left arm of the model deliberately reveals the collage-like nature of the composition and suggests that she has been “pasted” into a reality to which she does not, in fact, belong. Meanwhile, the yellow fingernails become a subtle sign of transience and the decay of the constructed ideal — a signal that the character’s moment of glory has long since passed. The painting refers to the fragility of status, the aesthetics of success, and the artificiality of social images when juxtaposed with the reality of excluded and marginalized places.
