Studio Daniel Canogar presents Maelstrom San Fernando, a collaboration with the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts of in Madrid. The projection coincided with International Museum Day 2024 on May 18, 2024.
Maelstrom San Fernando is a generative work that was projected on the Academy’s façade. The artwork was created with paintings from the Academy’s historic permanent collection, transformed through a custom-made algorithm. The result is the partial abstraction of the original works, converted into a dripping animation inspired by the pictorial technique of “action painting”. This evokes the incessant information that flows through the Internet, a medium that has greatly altered the way in which artworks are consumed, processed and circulated online. Maelstrom bridges historic genres of portrait, landscape and still life with digital media, as well as with abstract expressionism, with a specific nod to Clifford Still’s oeuvre, a painter that Canogar greatly admires.
Furthermore, the coexistence of artworks from different eras in a single ensemble is a metaphor for the elimination of linear time in the digital realm: the past, present and future collapse into each other, unified by the leveling effect of the Internet. In Maelstrom San Fernando, the artworks lose their original individuality as they become contaminated and dissolve into one another. Likewise, they are stripped of their central materiality, becoming intangible digital files projected on the walls of the museum. This fusion exemplifies how digital is transforming the way we archive, blurring the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, and challenging traditional conventions of the preservation and presentation of visual culture.
Maelstrom San Fernando has been part of a series of projections on the facades of important Spanish museums since 2019. In 2019, Amalgama El Prado was carried out, a work of art created in collaboration with the Prado Museum to celebrate the museum’s 200th anniversary. Likewise, in 2023 Scrawl was projected on the façade of the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum. Maelstrom San Fernando continues this dialogue between new media art and leading museums in Madrid, with the aim of inscribing new digital artistic currents in the canonical history of art.
Generative video projection.