20/20 Vision, Second Edition

The Art of Contemporary University Printmaking

Francisco Souto

I use art as a medium of mapping myself. This emotional disclosure testifies and corroborates the idea of art as a reflection of my own experiences. My work reflects my perspective on the world; therefore, it becomes a social interaction with those who respond to the work rather than a self-indulgent act. When I make art I don’t want it to simply function as way of making an image, I wanted art to be a way of thinking through an image. Art is for and of something…. A testimony of life lived.

In this fashion, the work becomes a balance between two dissimilar worlds. At one end is the admiration for historical processes, at the other, my current, personal experiences. This set of associations serves as a rhetorical junction to define the harmony of past and present. I am interested in how historical processes embody the nature of my aesthetics and how my current personal experiences signify my identity. The equilibrium of this temporal dichotomy serves as visual and conceptual catharsis, which constantly recalls dormant feelings in my memory.

My commitment with the technical narrative sets the foundation for developing the form. Images become witnesses of process and process becomes the ignition for images to materialize and to form the conceptual narrative. By means of exploring myself through the medium, I am satisfying the longing through the sensuality of the material and posing questions of how the resources of printmaking may be used, as its processes are derived from the very history that they seem to carry.

I have found that by utilizing old techniques, my images carry an implicit sense of history. I am aware that using such techniques is risky because their historical associations are tremendous; the work could be trapped within these visual parameters only. My approach is to break this historical conundrum that old techniques have in order to make my work an act in response of my reality.

Like an alchemist who mixes and matches substances in search of the utopian recipe that will turn base materials into revelatory media; my pursuit is to connect my aesthetics ‘memoirs’ with my own current conceptual experiences in order to make my work a truthful emotional disclosure.

As mentioned before, my approach is to open my eyes to the world so the work could become a witness of my life at the moment that it is created. In one of my early prints, a portrait of my wife represents a mirror image of myself; by depicting her, I am, by extension, portraying myself. A map of South America stands for the culture from where I come and also for a sense of geographical origin and placement. A paycheck stub -printed with translucent ink- becomes a piece of veracity; it embodies the notion of factual reality. It reveals a specific address, specific location and personal history that provide the print with a sense of currency and presence in time. These references in my mind become more emotionally resonant.

The persistent fascination in using art as a formative vehicle to identify my nature has led me to create a new body of work where the subject matter is recontextualize and disjointed by pairing objects in sequence of optical moments. Small sections of clouds and galaxies, blurry family picture paired with objects of time and nature function to me as threshold of consciousness because they make emotional associations rather than just optical juxtapositions. These images are recorded evidences of my own daily life; they recall memory fragments in an emblematic way that could be confuse at first but become expressive by reason of its optical mesmerization. In this approach, this new body of work is a combination of many things including mezzotints, drawings, photographs and digital printings. Ultimately, such a range of media is the result of pursuing a view of art as a formative vehicle and a body of work as a series of ideas pursued in different media.