To Remember and Wonder: Paloma Chávez Muente in Conversation with Concha Martínez Barreto

Concha Martinez Barreto.

Before the lockdown, you could find Concha Martinez Barreto looking for old photographs and objects in a vintage shop or market. She incorporates her found gems into drawings, paintings, and installations that evoke the passing of time and the fragility of memory. ‘I work with my obsessions, my fears, and affections,’ she says. Over the phone, the Spanish artist opens up about her approach to art, life, and her search for wonder. 

You often use vintage vernacular photographs as the point of departure for your work. When did you decide to adopt these images and how are they significant in your work?

The dichotomy between memory and forgetfulness explains a significant part of my work and the root of my interest in vintage photography. Some time ago I read an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist where he said that painting is a protest against forgetting. I began working with photographs in 2013 when I found a series of old pictures of family celebrations. My father couldn’t recognise a lot of the people that appeared next to him in the pictures and I wanted to recover them somehow. I spent hundreds of hours observing and drawing them. At that moment I had just separated from my partner, I was pregnant and had a 13-month-old baby. I felt life and death in all its intensity. It took me nearly two years to complete drawing ‘The Names’ in an enormous polyptych about the fear of no longer existing, vulnerability, and recovery.

Concha Martinez Barreto, The Names (Detail), Graphite on paper. 89 x 119 cm, 2014 - 2015

Would you say that the fragility of memory is at the core of your work?

I’m searching for what comes to life when you look at an image. I’m not reminiscing about the past as something dead. Barthes said that photography is the evidence ‘that has been’ and its absolute flatness makes it impossible to delve into the image. Despite this notion, in the series ‘Stratos’, I literally perforated photographs attempting to discover what lies beneath. In my paintings, I take people out of images and bring them to new scenarios, creating new narratives. The difference in scale or impossible shadows suggests that painting is an exercise that manifests the difficulty of trying to keep together things or lives that seem to fall into oblivion. Working with old photographs, which are loaded with questions and that I know almost nothing about, helps me to talk about what I can’t understand, the strangeness of memory and life. In my paintings, like in life, something is about to destabilise everything. Perhaps impermanence, the fact that we stop existing and loving, is what drives my painting.  

Concha Martinez Barreto, Strata. The Kiss, Photograph on Hahnemühle Baryta paper and original vintage photograph.93 x 110 cm, 2019

Your paintings convey an intimate quality that also reflects in the scale of your work.

My paintings are the backbone of my work. We are at a moment in painting that somehow reminds me of the nineteenth century because there is an ambition to occupy space with large-scale work. By contrast, my paintings are deliberately small and always measure 40 x 50 cm. You have to approach them to look at them closely and realize there is something strange in them. My work departs from small singular stories that are at once common and transferable. I adopt characteristics of historical paintings to subvert them: they are narrative paintings with figures in a long shot, there is no close-up or middle shot, making an analogy to cinematic images. We see something is happening in the scene, but we can’t grasp what some characters are doing or who they are, while others don’t fit and seem to have escaped from another painting or a different time. I’ve adopted a convention from medieval painting to narrate an event, sometimes portraying the same characters repeatedly doing different actions in various moments of their lives. As you mentioned, my paintings have an intimate quality that talk about affections, the familiar and time, which are themes present throughout my work. I also depict animals, charged with symbolism of the wild, freedom, innocence and old age, and place them in dialogue with other characters as a mirror or as longing. Through painting, I hold on to some things and let go of others. 

Concha Martinez Barreto, Untitled 19, Oil on linen. 40 x 50 cm, 2019

The familiar and the strange coexist in your paintings like the tension between fact and fiction, the past and the present. How does your work resonate with the present moment?

These are uncertain days and the fear of the future cannot be understood without accepting the past. My work evokes personal struggles and tell us that wounds accompany us when creating new paths in life. 

You have mentioned that your process has to do with searching for something. 

I think being an artist has to do with being alert, awake, constantly searching. In my process, I am triggered by intuition to feel the punctum of the image. There is an intellectual process to refine, but the most important thing is that sense of wonder which is purely instinctual, whether it’s through an image or an object which drives me to make work. 

What projects are you working on at the moment?

I am preparing ‘Letters I didn’t write’, my first solo show in London at CHARLIE SMITH LONDON gallery that will open in October. I have another show called ‘The Origin of the World’ in the Museum of Natural History of Madrid, where I will have an installation in dialogue with the dinosaur skeletons. Then, I will continue with my very slow production process. I live in a tiny farmers’ town in the southeast of Spain, far from the cultural centres of the country, and perhaps this remoteness makes me work at a different pace and helps to defines me.  

Concha Martinez Barreto, Untitled 29, Oil on linen. 40 x 50 cm, 2020

Concha Martinez Barreto (Murcia, 1978) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Murcia, Spain. She is represented by the galleries CHARLIE SMITH LONDON and Victor Lope in Barcelona.

Thank you Concha Martinez Barreto.

All imagery courtesy of the artists.

Paloma Chavez Muente,

Contributor, MADE IN BED