Rafael Triana

Tecnica: Acrylic on the reverse side of industrial placeholder paper, hand-painted and framed.

Anno: 2025

Dimensione: 70cm x 50 cm

Descrizione: Reverse begins with a minimal gesture: flipping the standard industrial paper inserted in a frame and hand-reproducing it using acrylic paint.

This paper—normally overlooked—is not meant to be seen. It is a printed simulacrum, a promise of image, a placeholder with no symbolic value. By flipping it and reactivating it through a manual painterly gesture, the simulacrum is reversed: what was once an anonymous background becomes an active surface.
The image does not change, but its status does.

The visual elements remain identical—logos, dimensions, generic compositions—but their passage through the hand, through slowness and the singularity of the gesture, radically transforms their reading.

The work thus interrogates regimes of visibility in contemporary visual culture: the border between function and fiction, between reproduction and original, between industrial surface and meaning-laden image.

By reactivating a banal object through painting, this piece challenges the supposed neutrality of industrial form and the performative value of the artistic gesture.

It is a reflection on the standardization of formats, the economy of signs, and the possibility of producing an image outside the spectacle system—by activating the flaw, the reverse, the invisible.