Omar Rodriguez-Graham: Painting After

“Painting After” is set as a series of pictorial reminiscences, like past quotes passed down by the works’ own vision and admired thoughts, in order to examine its visual construction. Rodriguez-Graham proposes a revision —a proper way of measuring the work’s context— by digitizing, then vectorizing classic European paintings, and finally, returning them to the canvas. Weighing the way we construct our visions from the remnants of the original visual data.

After more than twelve years of artistic research, Omar has developed a new way of expressing his narrative: his painting are a combination of memory and desire. Talking about his practice, the artist states: “painting should not function as a creation of images, but as a presentation of the fundamental language of painting”.

His recent work is founded under the Platonic concept of anamnesis, which he builds through the cannibalization of iconic images taken from Western art. By appropriating and distorting the figures, marks, colors and space of these classic works, the artist creates a visual vocabulary shaped, under different parameters, in completely new compositions.