Leonardo Vargas

We may state that the important role that image plays in nowaday´s societies is mainly based on the way we relate to them, or better, in the way they have been thought to relate with us. Our culture is a visual culture and this visual condition would manifest itself in two different ways.  On the one hand we have visual image as a language and on the other hand, we have image as surface.  We could affirm that both of them make use of visuality in different ways:  one in terms of code and the other in terms of pure abstract material, data, visual information.
 

Advertising images could be considered as one of the most common –if not the most common- type of image that surrounds us. In this domain we find a specific use for image. Image is used here as an important and crucial element of an established system, is used as a code for communication.  They are in charge of creating a very specific kind of relationship between them and the receiver; they are in charge of providing a specific message, a specific information with a specific meaning  to be understood. In this way images are used as signs -which I will take the freedom to define as stable elements that indicate certain specific information- . Signs aim to create a closed relationship between them as images and what they are indicating, but in fact is precisely this closed condition what the system requires to guarantee its stability. Now, we can notice that not only does advertising use image as sign but also any visual realm related to communication systems.  In this way we could affirm that language itself has made use of images as signs. Letters and characters are signs and their condition as images (with all the possibilities this implies) remains disabled, but at the same time given the fact we perceive them visually those possibilities will always be there.
 

On the other hand, images have been strongly developing a wandering condition since the second part of the last century. We run into images everywhere and at every time, we find them without being lost, we find that access to them is not only immediate but is also immediate the possibility of transferring them from one place to another (printed media, video, television, Internet). They float isolated from one context to another, freed from questions about their origin. Is in this way that images become surfaces.  A clear example might be an Image search in Google.  You can introduce any word and have thousands of images as a result –each one different -  which can be reproduced, copied, pasted, enlarged, manipulated- with the new technologies this manipulation is not only infinite but instant-. All of this makes the image forget about its charge and its burden of being a reproduction of an original and thus it becomes something different, becomes a surface.  As a second instance you can take any of these surfaces from the image search and place it into a software like Photoshop where you will probably find an option to make that surface look like Van Gogh`s style or like a cubist or expressionist  painting. 
In this way Art History itself becomes a surface too.  But at the same time, this condition gives us the possibility to use any kind image as a tool as well.
 

I am interested in operating from the displacement of this sign-images in order to create a field or mental space in which they would acquire an undetermined function in communicative terms. I aim to displace them into a wider zone in which they would be under a negotiation space in terms of what they would be indicating as signs and as images, and in terms of their own function as part of a communication system, just like some kind of Dysfunctional Interphase to which you could relate more in terms of sensation and at the same time follow and create different alternative pathways in terms of the relationship you have with them.  The displacement I refer to is conceived from media and appearance. Painting gives me the possibility of transforming these elements during the process, shifting them, treating them from a different perspective, from a different field of production that implies changes in form, time, contexts.  An image is set in motion as well when is inscribed into a context or a network, the possibilities are there as well.