The project emerged from a precarious attempt to renegotiate the reinterpretation of Manuel Ballester’s Raft of Medusa, which is based on the monumental painting of Theodore Gericault. Ballester’s print on canvas represents the remains of the raft itself, absent of people and bodies, similarly to his series of artworks untitled Espacios Occultos (Link). During a period of 3 months, I did the exact same thing, in complete ignorance of Ballester’s precedent work.

Of course, this coincidence is not an unfamiliar event in contemporary art practice and it rather manifests the parallel ideological grounds within European discourse and culture. In the past, Gericault’s painting has been a subject of “appropriation” for many other artists like Martin Kippenberger, Marc Bauer, Goldie and Steele, Greg Semu; a behaviour that tends to mobilise functions of the collective memory again and again, in a desperate attempt to unfold the layers of what is further hidden in Language; which leads us to the paradox: the more we attempt to put the hidden into display, the more sincere invisibilities occur. 

The version of the Raft I digitally edited counts 37 consecutive individual psd files of around 200 layers each, due to an elaborate effort to keep everything else in the painting “as it is”. Nevertheless, the common place I surprisingly found myself with Ballester obliged me to deconstruct my digital version of The Raft of Medusa. The elements that compose the hidden space behind Gericault’s human figures are now individual narratives or fragments that float in a gradient space of relevance.