Miguel Ángel Tornero

The Palacio de Cristal has traditionally been a space where artists are commissioned to work on a new piece conceived specifically for its unique architecture. Although the restoration and repair work currently being carried out on its structure means visitors cannot access its interior, the programme held within to support the public display of current art continues all the same. In fact, it is the radical imagination of artists that will enable the Museo Reina Sofía to continue to endow this emblematic space with cultural content. The first such artist to take part in this series is Miguel Ángel Tornero (Baeza, 1978), who contributes with a work devised for the canvases which will cover the building during its first year of restoration work.

In his most recent pieces, Tornero has drawn upon the photographs he takes in his daily life. A series of drifts in which the scene is the surrounding landscape of Madrid, his place of residence, ranging from small and trivial social interactions in and around the city to the monumental architecture of power that characterises the capital. He takes these images — in themselves fragments of a wider reality — and cuts and superimposes them on others, in an exchange of scale and motif which gives rise to richly complex collages, an arrangement of the remnants of multiple possible representations of the city.

Accommodated into these images of images are small businesses, huge urban advertising campaigns, the homeless, the posts and pillars that bear the weight of the city’s emblematic buildings… the final outcome is something at once whole and fragmentary, a complex sum that does not escape contradiction. These collages are the analogue result of the digital image, where, through the artist, the proliferation and contamination that shape contemporary visual culture, the layers of screens superimposed on reality, acquire the same consistency as things in the city. Tornero’s pieces manage, paradoxically, to make the photograph — flattening and reducing the real to two dimensions — the instrument which returns its condition as an object back to the image: a celebratory materiality that is also both exuberant and wild.

Gran friso (Big Frieze) forms an impression of the city by enlarging the minor decorative motif to which its title refers: an ornament of minor arts to adorn major architecture. In the tradition of the Panathenaea Procession in the Parthenon in Athens or the Ara Pacis in Rome, the visual narrative inevitably means to surround the building. Yet where the friezes in the tradition of classical temples told of great feats, here Tornero gauges the day-to-day of the city in its mundane mythologies, giving space to life itself.

In the artist’s words: “From the second-hand markets and flea markets we have learned the power of juxtaposition; how accumulation and contamination make things more powerful, mysterious and attractive, enriching and multiplying their meanings. Things is also the title of that book by Georges Perec — a story set in the sixties, but which maintains its validity and interest — where his unsatisfied characters hope that things will change or be theirs one day. In our own context, perhaps it is nothing more than an object of pages, yellowed over time, that we come across on a Sunday in the Rastro flea market in Madrid, living with a hundred other things on a market stall: a Casio keyboard, a stuffed bird, a mannequin with a wig, an incomplete silver cutlery set, Castellano loafers, a Nokia 3310, a space age lamp, leather fingerless gloves, a bag from a shopping centre, white ice skates, plates that bewilder…”.

Tornero also emphasises how “the interaction between the canvases, the structure of the Palacio and the external elements under construction add an additional layer of complexity, where architecture and artistic internation entwine in a continuous dialogue”.

The technique employed in producing the work also maintains the intimacy of the everyday and the simplicity of the circular nature of things that are used, with the process starting by modifying cut-outs from printed photographs with a maximum height of fifteen centimetres and affixed using household adhesive tape. They are then placed on a maquette made of wood and cardboard — reproducing the architecture — before finally being photographed. The resulting canvas reproduces these shots on a scale of over six metres, in an exercise of radical scale change, whereby the precarious original structure appears to support the building with its cardboard posts. The images of the city thus become still-lifes on a disproportionate urban scale and, at the same time, this monumental quality turns Gran friso (Big Frieze) into an enormous diorama which still speaks of the current state of the under-construction interior of the Palacio de Cristal. Further, the building’s transparency is metaphorically preserved on the canvas that extends across it: a city that makes itself transparent, giving a voice to its more wayfaring representations in the same heart of its great royal park.