“What’s in a name?
That which we call a rose,
by any other name,
would smell as sweet.”

Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

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In “Fora de Contexto” Bruno Miguel returns to Pop Art, a style that has guided aesthetic strategies and solutions since the beginning of his career. Starting from a fundamental landmark of contemporary art, when Marcel Duchamp titled an upside-down porcelain urinal Fountain (1917) and signed it as “R. Mutt”. By submitting this industrial ready-made object to an exhibition, Duchamp challenged the definition of art, arguing that the artist’s intention and context are more important than manual skill. Bruno uses the same tactic of renaming images taken from other contexts (without giving up manual craftsmanship). Here the artist appropriates images from comic books, animation, and illustration manuals to, by removing them from their original narratives, offer through the titles of the works another possibility of reading the images, a chance to comment with humor, irony, and lightness on the geopolitical, sociobehavioral, and economic issues of our time, bringing art history closer to the communication dynamics of social media, memes, and WhatsApp stickers.

What we are experiencing today with meme culture is, essentially, “Phase 2” of the logic of Pop Art, but operating at a speed and scale that Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol could never have predicted. The connection between Duchamp’s gesture in 1917 and the emergence of Pop Art in the 1950s and 60s is what consolidates the transition from modern art to postmodernity. If Duchamp opened the door to the ordinary object, Pop Art transformed it into an icon. The image is the found object. This connection allows us to understand that Pop painting (such as Lichtenstein’s) is not simply “cartoons on canvas” , but rather the application of ready-made logic to the technical image. Lichtenstein did not invent the image, he isolated it. He took a war or romance comic strip, enlarged it, and removed it from its original context, forcing the viewer to focus on the dramatic charge or banality of that single image. The meme works exactly the same way. We take a frame from a film, a celebrity photo, or a drawing and isolate it from its original narrative flow. Bruno studies, understands, and remixes these strategies, focusing on the metaphorical and sarcastic relationship between image and title.

To understand the technique Miguel developed for these paintings it is necessary to understand the techniques used in their original contexts. Ben-Day dots are a commercial printing technique developed in the late nineteenth century by Benjamin Henry Day Jr., popularized in the mid-twentieth century through comic books and Pop Art. They consist of the application of small colored dots (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) that, through variations in size and spacing, create shading, textures, and secondary colors. But in the works presented in “Fora de Contexto”, Bruno connects this technique with Pointillism and Georges Seurat, as well as with the dripping technique of Jackson Pollock. Print becomes painting. The false simplicity of color in his works when viewed from afar is re-signified as the viewer approaches. Each chromatic area of these paintings is made up of thousands of micro-droplets of varied colors. A complex surface loaded with textures and contrasts. Over approximately a year and a half, Bruno Miguel developed and
refined a technique combining polyester resin, pigments, acrylic paint, oil paint, and spray paint. The result is a pictorial surface rich in readings and full of mystery regarding how the processes were conducted.

 

Pop Art legitimized comic books, once considered subliterature, as “High Art”. Bruno explores this archaeology of the pop image and this ambiguity between so-called high and low culture. In our conversations at his studio, he always emphasizes how he became a painter thanks to this influence. Having been a comic book consumer since childhood normalized reading and the consequent communication through images. The now nostalgic newsstands were spaces of desire and powerful generators of aesthetic and conceptual references in the formation of his artistic
identity. An aspect he believes was fundamental for countless painters of his generation.

 

In the same way that new technologies revolutionized the cultural industry, comic books followed this movement. Marvel, Disney, and other pop culture brands became universes designed for consumer loyalty. Cinema, streaming platforms, games, collectibles, cosplay, fairs and events, and so on. Why shouldn’t contemporary art critically reflect these dynamics and references? Why not appropriate the language of social media? How can art history, which demands time for consolidation and legitimation, relate to the virality and obsolescence of memes? Today the meme is raw material for art, but the painter will always confront the time required to produce and consolidate painting-research and the madness of trying to keep up with the speed of
artificial intelligence and social media. Today we see contemporary painting, and even the NFT market or installation art, appropriating meme aesthetics. The meme is the “low repertoire” that, once transposed onto canvas, as in many artists of the new generation, gains the status of anthropological commentary. The same dynamic employed decades ago by Pop Art with comic books.

Painting a meme is an act of resistance against the speed of the internet. It is using the slow technique of painting to give weight and duration to something that would last only twenty-four hours in stories. Remixing is the engine of contemporary content and artistic production. This is not merely a choice of subject matter, it is an attempt to freeze the instantaneous and the Zeitgeist (spirit of the time). Yet deeper than that is understanding the dynamic and, instead of painting the image of the internet, employing it in the same way artificial intelligence does. Using what has already been thought, written, painted, and produced in our past, present, and the next five minutes to construct an artistic line of reasoning. Making and thinking remain divine insofar as they remain human. Unlike a new generation of painters, Bruno Miguel does not paint meme images. He studies this dynamic in order to reproduce the model of thought behind it in his research.