Pedro G. Romero
Casa Sin Fin
Archivo F.X. (Archive F.X.) is an ongoing project that Pedro G. Romero has been developing since 2000. It involves the recompilation, reorganization, and presentation of various sorts of archives, mostly related to contemporary Spanish history. The project is driven by Romero’s interest in establishing parallels between the tradition of iconoclasm and Spanish political heterodoxy in general, on the one hand, and radical avant-garde art practices, from Malevich to the Situationists, on the other. Though this intention is not always clear in the work itself, it is crucial to Romero’s long-standing procedure of using models of reality that he then manipulates to make reference to art and its processes.
Romero has spent the last ten years constructing his now enormous archive, containing different “chapters” that have been exhibited in successive solo and group art shows, including the Catalan pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale as well as, currently, “Atlas,” the show curated by Georges Didi-Huberman for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and “Às artes, cidadãos!” (To the Arts, Citizens!) at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves in Porto, Portugal. “Don Dinero” (Mr. Money, but also Gift Money) was the title of the most recent exhibition of the project. The works on view were all items that, in one way or another, are connected to money. One, Archivo F.X.—L’Argent, 2010, revolves around Robert Bresson’s final film, L’Argent (Money, 1983), whose tragic narrative is set off by a forged bill. Romero made DVD copies of the film, which he sold illegally for a small sum; it was also shown on a monitor in the gallery. In this piece, the critical basis of much of Romero’s work is particularly evident, creating a parallel mechanism between the work itself and the artist’s idea of what art should be in these times—neither rare, expensive, nor even necessarily legal.
Antiglobalización, 1999/2010, is a reproduction of a Spanish coin from 1937 used by a Catholic workers’ cooperative. The coin was altered when the word Catholic was mechanically obliterated by the co-operative’s later anticlerical owners. Papel-Máquina (Paper-Machine), 1999/2010, consists of reproductions of banknotes issued by Spanish city councils during the Civil War. As in much of his work, here Romero has gathered unusual and overlooked artifacts of everyday material culture that he attempts to redefine or view critically. Though this project is based on the idea of the archive, its ultimate aim is to challenge that very idea, since the artist recontextualizes the original materials to provide them with a new meaning. There is a conflict between the interest and power of archival materials and the artist’s desire to leave his mark; documentary evidence is presented as if it were fiction. Hence, Archivo F.X. in general and “Don Dinero” in particular can be seen as antithetical to, for instance, Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, 1962–, or, especially, Fischli & Weiss’s compendium of photographs Visible World, 1986–2001.Whereas those works celebrate the visual surface of reality, Romero, while emphasizing the fascination of historical records, at the same time attempts to convince us that the very idea of the document is questionable.
Translated from Spanish by Jane Brodie.