Azucena Vieites, pure dynamite, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando

Although Vieites has held individual works in the main museums – recently, in Patio Herreriano and, before, in the IVAM, Museo Reina Sofía, MUSAC and Artium –, never before has his fragile and liquid graphics been so protected as in these secluded rooms of National Chalcography, on the scale of a historical cabinet. Paradoxically. Well, his work, rooted in the precarious after punk scene in the Basque Country at the beginning of the nineties and anchored in the “truth” of a unattended adolescent melancholy between fragments and emptyalways calls for insurrection. Pure dynamite.

Trained in visual arts in the eighties in the midst of the postmodern debate around appropriationism, Vieites’ images based on low popular culture deconstruct the messages emittedusing low-fi techniques, such as photocopies, design with a low-capacity computer and screen printing – in the wake of Warhol.

At the service of a weak aesthetic that responds to media spectacularityfragmenting and introducing layers that hide unforeseen areas and leaving deletions visible: repeating the processes over and over again, with which the differences appear in indecisive strokes.

He also coincides in the development of his poetry in the nineties with a generation of artists on the international scene who rcast out the glamor of the art system commodification of the “piezones”, to turn to drawing and other manual processes linked to affective experiences such as those reflected in the environments queer under Judith Butler’s performative notion of contested gender and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s closet epistemology.

Vieites joined this trend by forming the feminist group Errekzioa/Rección in 1994 with Estíbaliz Sádaba. And always present line to which tribute is paid with the cover of an essay by Kosofsky designed by the artist at the end of this unforgettable exhibition. After the exciting tour, with the doors open to Goya’s room of plates and engravings, we found the natural continuity of Vieites in the thread of tradition. Another unexpected surprise.

Award, therefore, well deserved but which would not have been possible without the renewal of criteria and composition of the jury. This ancient institution, with pyrrhic percentages of winners and left as impossible in feminist demands for equal opportunities, has hit the nail on the head by choosing Azucena Vieites to proclaim a radical change.