Jeff Wall

Wall acts as a painter of history: he chooses, designs and meticulously recreates the scenes, as seen in A sudden gust of wind (1993). He asks his actors for certain attitudes and gestures, many of them taken from paintings and that correspond to behavioural patterns from which the artist sets up a gestural syntax. His photographs are the staging for a dramatic imagined event, as exemplified by Explosion (1989) and Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor,  Afghanistan, winter 1986) (1991-1992). For the construction of his images he uses theatrical, artifice and verisimilitude notions, which on the other side, time stops rather than continues, bringing it closer to a cinematic ending.

A baroque artist because of this formal and conceptual use of images, on numerous occasions Wall resorts to allegory as a rhetorical-representative recourse for the creation of these fictions and to deliver his message. Thus, in the words of José Lebrero, The giant (1992) it is an allegorical recreation of the grandeur and longevity of wisdom. The nine works that make up this exhibition, integrated into the "Projects" programme, allow for an examination of Wall’s passing from photographic staging to the adoption of information technology as a new resource for graphics media. So, the journey goes from an instantaneous character in his older works such as Mimic (1982), to the digital collage of his last photographs, as in the case of The giant, made up of over forty different images painstakingly assembled by computer.