TIEMPO COMPRIMIDO / VOZ COMPRIMIDA-(Tiempo Compressed / Voz Compressed)
COLLAGE ELABORATED WITH THE COVER OF THE COLOMBIAN WEEKLY VOZ AND THE COLOMBIAN NEWSPAPER EL TIEMPO,
UNIQUE PIECE. 24 X 19,5 CM AND 22 X 20,5 CM [WITH FRAME].
A newspaper cover is an arbitrary event. An editor selects, corrects, and hierarchizes the contents. All information is arranged within a pre-established format. For example, a large image on the left, text on the right, a small image at the bottom left, and an advertising strip. The front page, and the newspaper in general, contains information that is to be communicated with a distinctive voice and tone. It is enough to read the local newspapers in Bogota, the city where I live, or anywhere in the world, to notice the differences. The printed newspaper loses its relevance almost immediately, it becomes trash, some trace of information remains in the readers’ minds and the next day the process is repeated.
In several of my works, I have sought to extract a synthesis of the visual language used by the print media. I have used various strategies, such as color averaging, fragmenting the materials and reorganizing them. In this case, I decided to cut and superimpose fragments (as a kind of reconstruction) but without changing the order. As a result of this operation, I obtained an image in which the written text disappears, except for the name of the newspaper, and there remains an outline of the layout, the spaces for text and advertising, and in general I managed to compress the cover without discarding any part of the material.
Suppressing text helps you see other things. The reading concentrates on the images and structures, the color, the spaces and the relationship between quantities. The communication strategy is seen from a visual perspective. In this way, a material that in a very short time becomes trash, is immortalized and becomes a work of art.
This finding, somewhat accidentally, also allowed me to connect the name of the newspapers with the result: “Compressed Time”, elaborated with the cover of El Tiempo, the newspaper with the largest circulation and which could be ideologically located on the right; and “Compressed Voice”, elaborated with the cover of Voz (weekly) of the left practically unknown by the general population.