"NO NEWS OF INTEREST" OSCAR SECO 

 

The starting anecdote is well known: “No news of interest” is the text that appeared in the last Republican edict issued during the Civil War. The republic had been defeated. A laconic and retrospectively eloquent message that Óscar Seco (Madrid, 1964) uses to give the title to the exhibition he is presenting at the Blanca Soto Gallery. With it, he closes a cycle that in recent years has been carried out with the theme of the Spanish civil war as a backdrop to touch on universal themes that in recent times have not ceased to be topical.

 

Thus, a significant group of works (paintings, models and the video that gives the exhibition its title) is shown together with the latest productions in the series. For his second exhibition at the Blanca Soto Gallery, Seco has built an exhibition device that intervenes and overflows the "white cube" of the room. As if it were the pages of a sticker album, the artist uses an angle of space to paint a monochrome mural on which the smaller-format pieces are arranged, reduplicating their meanings and providing them with a new frame in tune with the declared character. “Baroque” (Óscar Seco) from the series. The video “No news of interest”, made in collaboration with Manuel Mingo, uses the “stop motion” technique, an animated frame-by-frame narration. Militiamen, mutant monsters, national officials, superheroes and comic villains, in addition to an intensive use of war iconography are, among others, the ingredients and characters of the delirious stories that Seco narrates in these works that address serious issues with a high sense playful – even grotesque – to the point of blowing up a story weighed down by an endemic Manichaeism at the service of power.

 

With a coherent and consolidated trajectory, the work of Óscar Seco is characterized by a motley and at the same time fresh style of pop reminiscences that appropriates various iconographic sources (posters, comics, cinema, science-fiction, advertising, etc.) amalgamated through shock aesthetic strategies. His ora, which has been the subject of multiple solo exhibitions over the past 20 years, has proceeded through various thematic series. Beginning with painting, his output has expanded since the late 1990s to making videos, meticulous models and dioramas, and photography. In the same way as his crazy conjunction of images, the works obey a technical heterogeneity that privileges interweavings and hybridizations.