Xavier Robles de Medina
15th century Chan Chan mass grave discovered in Peru, Live Science, 17 November 2021, 2022

In Robles de Medina’s practice textual and visual research constantly overlap, resulting in rigorous and layered works that blend the micro with the macro, the personal with the generic, and the contemporary with the historic. Each carefully chosen image that the artist appropriates and translates into paintings, drawings and reliefs is at once connected to his own history and identity, and to a broader collective memory of global events. The process of collecting source images is somehow intuitive for the artist, who, once attracted by specific images, spends as much time contemplating their broader implications and interconnectedness as he does crafting them into their new form and context.

This rigorous approach, echoing an archaeologist’s labour of unearthing remains in the ground, finds a parallel in a painting depicting an excavation site. In Robles de Medina’s practice, meticulous research and the painstakingly slow application of paint become inseparable, thus heightening the relationship between the artwork’s subject matter and how it materializes in the form of a painting. As he works, layers of societal and political history slowly unravel until they culminate in a shiny, grainy surface in which an image finally reveals itself.