¿Quién pagará el pato?

“Our age undoubtedly prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to reality, the appearance to being…. For it, the only sacred thing is illusion, while the profane is truth. What is more, the sacred becomes greater in her eyes as truth decreases and illusion increases, so much so that the height of illusion is for her the height of the sacred.”

Feuerbach

This project is about how the image and painting is assimilated and consumed. It is a work that questions its own representation.

The object that I have used as the guiding thread of the project is a rubber duck, this element is the one that marks the compass of the exhibition, posing a formal challenge on the elasticity of the image and representation. It is a project that, as well as posing a formal investigation, also conceals an ironic vision of society and art.

The intention of developing a project from a banal element such as a rubber duck, reflects with a tone of humour an exaltation of the unimportant, which poses the counterpart on the classical vision of painting as an event that gives dignity to the portrayed, in fact, all this series on the duck are actually portraits of this figure. This raises the question of who is in front of the painter and why he is being portrayed.

In a way, the duck ridicules the question of art as an object of praise and as an aesthetic fetish of high economic value. This element raises the metaphor of emptiness, a light plastic industrial element that is hollow inside. As an icon that belongs to the collective imaginary, it is the fruit and means of the spectacle that Guy Debord announced in 1967 -The Society of the Spectacle-.

The duck, as a well-known pop icon, speaks indirectly of the consumer society, of the public and ultimately of the manipulation of some people over others. My intention with the reiteration of this figure is to construct a symbol. It is a piece of plastic with the innocent appearance of a smiling duck. And it is precisely this appearance and this aesthetic that is consumed by it, an idolised icon, which provokes a passive look at the world and contributes to the lack of a critical attitude. The rubber duck is for me the perfect symbol of our society, moreover it has the format of a toy, which is given to children for delight and evasion.

The image itself is a dangerous or delicate instrument. In terms of illusion, the image has the quality of deceiving the eye, it is the medium for the articulation of representation and fiction. And the problem that arises in a general way in contemporary society in relation to the image, whether in advertising, the media or the image produced in social networks, is that this fiction is consumed and objectified as reality and as truth.

The duck, as an object, is articulated as a reflection of contemporary society, the admired – the plastic, the pop, the industrial – that which is imposed and blindly accepted. The duck, in short, is a symbol of the construction of appearance, where the image is used as a means of manipulation.

During the process of working on the duck, I wanted to introduce a foreign element to it, a horse, in reference to the figure of the equestrian portrait, a figure very often reiterated over the years in the tradition of portrait painting, an image commonly associated with kings and generals, and which on many occasions has been represented from the most extravagant idealisation, an unequivocal symbol of greatness and power.

In fact, the association of this figure with the element of the duck is used to ironise the “person portrayed” and the art placed at the service of power and the elite, as well as to ironise the monumentality of the representation.

The equestrian portrait used to be associated with the idealisation of a personage, starting from an image that easily fell into pretentiousness. It was an image whose filter of illusion was comparable to the phenomenon of exhibition that occurs in social networks, where the individual is portrayed under a subjective and idealised vision. This is an aspect that I find interesting since it generates an alignment between the phenomenon of the classical image and the image used in contemporaneity, both under the concept of appearance.

These equine figures make an explicit mention of the portrayed element, in contrast to the way in which the duck is portrayed, which creates an ambivalence in the representation. The combination of these two elements provides a new extreme in the formal play that is repeated in the series, with the form wandering between the amorphous and the explicit construction of the detail.

I use the element of the duck to articulate the reflection on the construction of fiction, where what is represented appears in a way that does not clearly reveal what is represented, destabilising the veracity of the image shown.