BIG TOURISM: SIMULTANEOUS SIMULATIONS. PEDRO MEDINA AT CERQUONE MADRID

On this occasion, Medina –based in Caracas, Venezuela– reflects on the transience of contemporary life, juxtaposed with the long-term processes of pictorial matter, in a form of collage-painting in which photographic images taken from his life experience intermingle with the wandering images of the global iconosphere.

In this unpublished selection of medium-format works, the artist's particular tastes bear witness to simultaneous existences of a world globalized through technology and the Internet, in which endurance car races, screenshots, video games and everyday landscapes coexist in his wandering journey through the network. And the fact is that, if in Pedro Medina's previous processes –according to curator Ruth Auerbach– "the point of view chosen by the artist to discover his images is invariably situated from those places he frequents", on this occasion the artist maintains the premise of finding his images from his own place of enunciation, representing the time in which he develops.

Regarding this "simultaneous" existence of layers and images, in the text by Manuel Vásquez Ortega that accompanies the exhibition, the curator states that "the construction process of Pedro Medina's recent works slows down, pauses and stops the images from their wandering, from their circling until they expire in the dynamics of a contemporary society dedicated to discarding everything that has already been seen". In this way, the artist manages to "recover the images from their expiration and their oblivion in the face of the vertical displacement to which our eyes have become accustomed".

For the artist, the works to be shown are ways of understanding his own reality: "iterations of moments, instances of worlds and simulations" of a fleeting and referential existence of the life cycle of images, massively created through our cell phones and shared in infinite ways through social networks and the internet. In this way, the artist is showing a new idea of portraiture in his work: one in which he is described through his hobbies and interests in computers, physics, astronomy and the transcendental human events unleashed by technology and its excesses.

Thus, "in this pictorial turn Pedro Medina's interests are present to show that all things coexist in realities that cross themselves, in themes such as relativity, simulation, simultaneity and a universe in itself in which all the events portrayed inhabit," says the curator. In this way, "the works that make up Gran Turismo bring us closer to visualities of human realities that do not coincide in this reality, but that coexist in an abstract space impossible to determine by the human logics of the present". Finally, throughout the exhibition, one issue predominates over the questions that the works raise beyond their technical execution, posing an ambiguous concept of hyperreality: "one that has no origin or reality to which to attach itself".

Gran Turismo: Simultaneous Simulations, by Pedro Medina will be open to the public from Wednesday, September 13 through November 15, 2023, at Cerquone Madrid, Calle de López de Hoyos, 64, 28002.