Images are time machines. They take us to the past, project a future for us and place us in the present. Those of art have a mechanics oiled by tradition and codes, by a great evolutionary story based on influences, tensions and ruptures; various forms of a chain that has been going on for millennia. They are precise machines. They have the potential to exist at all times and places, and if they are generated for the first time in a specific time and place – as well as if they return to rethink certain logics of the past or are launched towards a future vision that will be understood later -, what They are driven by a need. They never appear on a whim. Images from individual memory, or from a projected fantasy, do not appear arbitrarily either. They are immaterial entities loaded with subjectivity, they have the virtue of being able to travel on a confusing border between what has really happened (or to happen) and fiction, deforming or becoming exaggeratedly detailed. They can address a wide spectrum of senses -olfactory, tactile, auditory- as well as catalyze emotions that are installed directly in the body, be it enjoyment, happiness, melancholy, desire. Today we are going through a particular moment where the consumption of images, especially photographs (and I always assumed that Dino thinks from photography, which does not imply that he produces only photographs), poses a new experience of time. On the one hand, applications like Instagram put us in front of a consumption that is updated minute by minute; Hundreds of apparently unrelated images form an uninterrupted sequence of multiple presents (an even more frenetic sensation with Snapchat, where a photo lasts less than 10 seconds on the phone to return to its latent image limbo). On the other hand, image searches on Google return a mosaic of temporary schizophrenia. “Malevich”, for a search engine, is both a painting by the Russian artist and one reproduced on a poster, a tattoo on a young woman’s neck or a tablecloth. Without hierarchies or chronologies, hundreds of images appear simultaneously and under a relationship forged, in a few seconds, by an algorithm. The past, present and future are on the same non-linear plane. When photography has become a means of communicating that is as everyday as it is complex, the artist immerses himself in it, goes through it and expands it, to think about how they are consumed, how they are produced and what today’s images give us. Above all: what is worth watching again. This is the case of Dino Bruzzone. In previous works such as Italpark, Dino reflected, at the same time, on the construction of the photographic image and that of memory. In a process of layers and, therefore, of mediatizations, he started from a photo of the park that he returned to three-dimensionalize in a model to, finally, photograph it again. As if exhuming an idealized and lost imaginary, he dug deeper and deeper into the image, reconstructing it again and again; so that it vibrates again not as a document but as a memory. Subsequently, certain methodologies varied and other elements came into play, but the artist always maintained his analytical imprint (both of the medium and of memory) by getting inside the image, reconstructing it or breaking it down, going towards detail as well as towards deformation. Among the souvenir objects, linked to childhood or adolescent pleasure, there were added modernist utopian architectures and comics, which would take their investigations both towards modernity and towards fiction and the popular. And, from there, he would open a path around painting. In an accelerated way, this places us in the present. Why, starting from photography, produce and show painting again? Divisionismo, the new series by Dino Bruzzone, allows us to think of the intersection between photography and painting as a portal to enter the complexity of the contemporary image. Again, in a layering process, Dino scans the cover of a comic from the sixties, passes through the image with a Photoshop filter to decompose it and focus on a point of RGB color. Depending on whether you choose to discriminate the red, the green or the blue, the points will have different scales and forms of distribution, either ninety degrees or diagonally. Then he makes the linear black drawing of the comic on a frame, masks said frame with a map of the points, projects said map as if he were projecting an image on photographic paper, but in this case he paints the points in oil to make them appear. We are no longer facing the reconstruction or deformation of the image as in previous works, but rather an atomization where the point of color is the focus. It is likely that for a very young Dino, color printing of comics using the Ben Day dot technique was an important first cultural experience with color as an entity in itself; as matter and texture, something possible to enjoy and perceive beyond the image that encapsulates it. In a time where photographs are no longer printed, where color is screen light and, possibly, will be an immaterial spectrum when virtual reality devices become homely, Dino recovers the sensation of color as pure corporeal matter. This search is emphasized by freeing and autonomizing the points: in some paintings they correspond exactly to the figure in black, but in others they are offset by several centimeters, managing to demarcate the color from the line, disarticulating what could be the background color and the color of the the figure by taking them to the same abstract plane (which coexists with another plane of pure figurative line).

In other cases, Dino zooms in on a small detail of the comic and the composition enters a terrain where the subject becomes confusing or disappears to, again, free the color. All these strategies of rematerialization of color, which come from the pleasant memory of the Ben Day dots, are developed through an element that is not at all capricious: oil, the DNA of color in the art of the last 500 years, which not only causes that sensation of materiality, but also opens up a new journey through time. Starting from the points, sometimes with a flatter line and other times more free, it is possible to go towards pointillism (one of the first movements that analyze the pure elements of painting and begin the path towards abstraction), go through expressionism (terrain of modern pictorial emotionality) and landing in Pop (a movement that dismantles modernity and its autonomy by inviting the popular image into the discussion). Paradoxically, Dino finds a black hole in a point of color, which allows him to travel or be simultaneously within various temporal dimensions, which allows him to identify with them but stand out through the difference that the multiple brings. Pointillism is pop, pop is expressionism, expressionism points Ben Day, the RGB of Ben Day a CMYK of photoshop, photoshop a pictorial tool, painting a way of embodying color, the texture of color an element to reflect on photography and, in turn, about the emotional return of childhood memories. The image does not appear on a whim: it addresses this complex present of crossed temporalities, where art history and personal memory, identification and estrangement are interwoven. Dino offers us a new journey within the image; an experience unmarked from the one we have every day in front of the screen.

Javier Villa February 2016.