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As an artist my job is to convert the raw material of reality into spectacle as mediated by my imagination. “If I transform violence into fireworks, into spectacle,” asserts Valeriano Bozal, “at that very moment the most fundamental aspect of violence – its destructive aspect – disappears and we are left with the fog of agitated movements of people and objects…”

There is a metaphor that has stuck with me through the years and it is Achille Bonito Oliva’s phrase which describes the manner in which we consumed the media coverage of the Iraq war and especially the bombing of Baghdad as an innocuous “dew of war.” The ethical dilemma implied by the aestheticization or domestication of such a violent event – from the moment it becomes “breaking news” and is then converted into art through painting – constitutes the axis of the my recent work.

Appropriating everyday images whose authorship and authority become less important and to which ordinary mortals have instant access via the web or print media, I launch a new kind of neo-historicism. I try to atomize the citation (which is no longer sacred), a process made evident through a procedure of pictorial distancing – a distortion of a distortion, we might say – in which the original reference is totally lost. In this sense we can affirm that my images carry the bastard sign since their true lineage is unknown. And yet, the works continue to carry a certain mysterious aura since they have been converted; extracted from their origins and sublimated into art works.

In a kind of covert operation, I manipulate this “found material,” creating images that verge on abstraction. I try to alters the initial, literal sense of the image and confuse the spectator with a beautiful image where the essential element is very often exactly what we can not see. We are forced to rely on our other senses to fill in where they can. Thanks to this pictorial treatment, the “epicness” of the image overtakes us, but as an evocation not evidence. Thus, in our perception of the image there is something missing whose very absence hints at the fact that we are viewing an alteration. Chromatic treatment –bright pigments and fluorescent colors in tune with these times – leaves us with a visual residue that is hedonistic, even perverse. In short, these paintings should not only be seen, but felt in all their fragmentation.

This conscious exile of the evidence (or dissolution of the referent) becomes, by extension, a critique of our political apathy and indifference by dint of living passively with a sublimated or naturalized violence. Its very everydayness makes it invisible. However, my entire artistic modus operandi is also a commentary on painting itself. Once again, my discursive substance reappears: The representational capacity of the pictorial, its responsibility as guarantor of tropological ambiguity, and its keen ability to deal both in the arena of the art world and beyond. Once again, I am playing with the symbolic status of painting and its capacity to, at once, monumentalize and trivialize human drama.

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Armando Mariño was born in Santiago, Cuba in 1968.  He has been a recipient of several grants and residencies and his work has been included in many collective shows around the world. His work is part of many private and public collections including The National Museum of Havana, Deutsche Bank Collection, Coca Cola Foundation, Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection, Howard Farber Collection, The Berado Collection, the Museum of Contemprary Art of Vigo and others.