Mariló Fernández, a member of LaFundició, started in Bellvitge (L’Hospitalet) 12 years ago giving painting classes to a group of neighbors from the neighborhood.
Las Mujeres de Millones
is a publication that articulates a process of reflection and is assembled with the audiovisual produced together with María García.
Las Mujeres de Millones attempts to establish a place for meeting, dialogue, and collaborative discourse construction, on a very common practice that is painting in civic centers, cultural centers, or neighborhood associations focused on copying as a learning process.
«The presence and circulation of a representation (taught as the code of socioeconomic promotion by preachers, educators, or popularizers) in no way indicate what that representation is for the users. It is necessary to analyze its manipulation by practitioners who are not its manufacturers.»
The Practice of Everyday Life 1. Arts of Doing
Michel De Certeau
This work attempts to apprehend in some way how some of the mechanisms that come into play when paintings are copied are articulated. The object of plagiarism that occurs in the context of Bellvitge could be classified into three broad groups: the first would include what we call “great masters of painting” (Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet…) among whom there is a special predilection for the Impressionists, pre- and post-. The contact with these references does not come through the channels of the art field: museums, galleries, catalogs… but through what Eloy Fernández Porta describes in his book
Homo Sampler
as «identification by resonance», that is «the learning of an artistic and traditional reference by analogy with another commercial and modern- i.e., associating The Four Seasons by Vivaldi with the advertisement of Miel Granja San Francisco.» or Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles, The Mona Lisa by Da Vinci or The Women of Tahiti by Gauguin, with the television fillers of La 2 during the nineties «for an immense minority» (this was the motto of the channel).
The second block would be that of the paintings that are distributed through furniture stores with the whole range of changing fashions and styles that the market is marking in this sector, the images of the almanacs are also a reason for plagiarism, bucolic landscapes, meadows with a little house and flock of sheep, waterfall with mountain, little house and fawns, horses or dogs…
In the third block would enter contemporary painters recognized as “figures” in this context. This sector escapes many of the logics that from cultural theory are applied to understand why certain objects classified as kitsch or popular are valued. We can venture what makes the reproductions of the work of one painter and not another shoot up in the group of painters from Bellvitge, it is difficult to understand under what criteria some are consolidated and others are not.
Eduardo Millones is one of these cases: an eighty-year-old Peruvian painter whose work is a kind of remake of the early works of Diego de Rivera. Millones’ “recognition” has led to one of his paintings becoming the image of the
Art
collection of Puzzles Educa alongside Klimt, Gauguin and Velázquez.
Under these considerations, we have tried with the magazine to establish some conversations that help us to glimpse the places in which to settle our drift. We hope that this will be the first of many meetings to share.