Materia Gris | Grey Matter
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes 2023
"Gray Matter" comprises a series of large-scale paintings that resonate with the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. The works delve into the realm of painting to underscore the cyclical and secular interactions embedded within our visual history. Exploring themes such as time, chance, change, creation, and destruction, the pieces review, within an abstract and minimalist matrix, the way in which reality and history have been materially processed as images. In crafting "Gray Matter," Franco incorporated images sourced from the museum’s extensive collection—spanning paintings, sculptures, ornaments, documents, and press materials. Each image, meticulously captured, was then transferred onto thick aluminum panels through a chemical reaction induced by acid contact with the metal. This initial process laid the foundation for a series of immense paintings, some measuring up to 300 inches wide, seamlessly blending intricate industrial techniques with subtle artisanal interventions. The exhibition propose a reflection on the material condition of the image, to inquire into the technical deployment that modulates, transforms and reorganizes the visual experience, that is to say, to appeal to the technical history of images, which is essential when thinking about the images of history.
Recognizing Oneself in the Fog
Ariel Florencia Richards
The seven monumental paintings by Nicolás Franco that made up Materia Gris (2023)—with their meticulous material work and prior archival research—acquired a radical significance when they were exhibited in the Sala Matta of the Museum of Fine Arts at the end of 2023. By that time, the fiftieth anniversary of the Coup d'État in Chile was being commemorated, and the MNBA had programmed retrospectives of important Chilean artists to engage memory and project the future of democracy. However, that cultural effort lacked a critical approach to the present: there was no one or nothing to problematize with new works the intricate intersections of art, violence, and archives that the anniversary proposed. In other words, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Coup, the past returned intact as merely past.
Outside of that official program but within the museum, Nicolás Franco's exhibition slipped through unnoticed, opening— with effective simplicity—a space for uncertainty from the basement. Materia Gris (2023) unsettled that institutional effort to revisit the past and reminded us of the problematic nature of anchoring an image to memory. While Franco’s operation was simple, as he did not even hang the seven pieces but rather propped them up tilted between the floor and the walls of the Sala Matta, the effect was unsettling. Like opaque mirrors that revealed nothing definitive in their reflections, the works disclosed a complex interplay of engraving, painting, and corrosion that incited us to recognize familiar signs in the fog. To search for something, to say something.
These dirty, torn, and stained surfaces resembled fragments of bus covers, industrial sheets, and makeshift coverings of commercial spaces—public "canvases" where political messages, promises of love, and disillusionment are freely scrawled. However, like a hologram, and pointing to a dangerous historical continuity, classical and foundational figures from the artistic and cultural canon preserved and installed by the museum appeared through this interference of free street expression. Forms and bodies fleetingly distinguished among stains, splashes, and scratches.
Even though the heavy panels had sharp and clear profiles, what lay within them was pure erasure. In that sense, no figure inside those "canvases" was entirely visible or graspable at a glance. In his studio, Franco had carefully poured images from the museum's historical collection: paintings, sculptures, ornaments, documents, and press clippings—all fused into a chameleonic and spectral surface. Altogether, it was as if those seven pieces had fallen (with all their weight) into the Sala Matta by chance, reminding us through their nebulous illusions that something was still pending. In fact, even the angle at which they were propped against the walls emphasized that feeling of suspense.
A simple walk through Materia Gris (2023) confirmed that no angle of the room ensured better visibility than another. All the images were elusive, dark, and translucent. From suspicion and unease, the vibration of each work urged us for more: to move and decipher them. Because Nicolás Franco’s exhibition, with its date, title, and layout, was, in itself, a provocation. That impossibility of fixing an image reminded us that memory, more than a fixed concept to be revisited, is a task exercised from uncertainty. The theorist Guilherme Wisnik, an involuntary but unavoidable ally of this exhibition, uses fog to define the tragic and sublime world we live in—a world in which utopias have blurred and violence is exercised in hidden and omnipresent ways.
In this sense, the blurry images of Materia Gris (2023) employed the ambiguity of fog to oppose the iconic works of the state's cultural project chosen to commemorate the fifty years since the Coup d'État in Chile. They represented the opposite of the conciliatory light of certainty. They proposed a different displacement than that of the retrospectives. In them, the references were blurred, stripping them of their inaugural aura: they were stained, interrupted, and fragmented. Covered, veiled, and set apart. This means that Franco's operation addressed the impossibility of fixing an image and resorted to the terrible practices with which the dictatorship operated. From that subjugation resulted this nebulous landscape.
While the panels were as pictorial as they were sculptural and functioned as an installation in their round, I remember feeling bewildered the day I went to see them at the museum. Because my impression upon leaving was that I had witnessed a performance. I felt I had experienced something irreproducible and ephemeral. How could it be that, before heavy and solid paintings, from their limited two-dimensionality, the lightness of the performative emerged? I only now understand that the fog, which never favors the immediate, instead generates a slower and more cautious awareness. It blurs the clarity of the visible and sharpens other senses. I will never forget that time when, climbing a mountain with two friends, a fog suddenly rose from the ground that turned the entire landscape gray: the only way we could locate ourselves and know we were there was by shouting to each other. In that space reconfigured by uncertainty, no image served as an anchor.
I believe that Franco’s erasure in Materia Gris (2023) did not function as a sign of disappearance but as a testimony of a displacement and a waiting. In that sense, there was something pending to happen that needed to be experienced in the museum that year. His exhibition was neither retrospective nor an anthology that clarified and rendered impeccable an archive. Nor did it bring back works made in the past; instead, it generated through uncertainty a provocation that called for something to be said in the present. For me, what came to my mind while in the Sala Matta, surrounded by those seven panels, was a brief phrase of two words. Something commonly said in everyday contexts as a signal of verification and as a way to conclude searches, a form of greeting that nullifies distance. What I said was what I felt in my body, and I directed it both at the images on the panels (which demanded to be recognized) and at the intention of erasure (with all its violence): I see you.
