Lasai Restaurante

Memorias Analógicas

The artist Maite Pinto Zangróniz (Logroño, 1993) presents in this exhibition a selection of her most recent graphic work, where printmaking becomes a vehicle for exploring memory, identity, and the passage of time.

Analog Memories is a project that rescues family archive photographs from the 1950s, recreating them through intaglio printmaking. While relatives and people from the circle in the photo seek recognition, for others the image becomes a window into an imaginary world without names, stories, or narrative, where the poetics of the unconscious create a new fiction.

The techniques used in the series combine etching and aquatint. First, I carry out a brief acid bite to delicately engrave the image onto the copper plate, achieving a very subtle initial line. Then, I focus on tonal nuances through aquatint, a technique that allows me to approach the luminous richness of the original photograph. Each plate requires between ten and twelve biting stages, gradually building the tonal range. This process of translating the photographic image onto the matrix creates a distance from the reference: although the print retains multiple tonalities, what emerges is a transformed image where the memory of bygone times can be glimpsed.

Analog Memories was created with the production grant of Fundación Bilbao Arte 2019, exhibited at La Gota de Leche (Logroño), presented at the Open Portfolio Bilbao, and awarded the El Correo Stand Prize at FIG Bilbao 2019.