“In 2020, during the pandemic, I began a journey through the city of Santo Domingo using Google Maps' street view. I paid particular attention to the visual documentation captured by individuals through their smartphones rather than the more precisely defined images from Google's 360° cameras. This documentation, more than being exact and precise, displaced the city's images and returned them to an intimate and lively representation, reflecting multiple temporalities and nuances. This documentation aims at capturing the honest tonality of gestures portrayed but not documented, contrasting the human process of observation with the potential clinical panopticon of immense mechanical vision.

From these "unofficial" 360° images, I selected specific fragments and translated one of them into a painting. I am interested in the process of translating the affective and everyday information contained in these images into another visual medium, one that can reconstruct their parameters for new interpretations outside the web. Through an accumulation of marks and gestures, I am recreating the materiality that constitutes the tangible reality of those corners, hangout spots, poses, and buildings captured on these global visibility platforms. My goal is to reflect the density and material complexity of Santo Domingo's urban ecosystem, to explore the multiplicity of symbolic relationships when the marginalized landscape becomes the subject, and to discover possible narratives that emerge from an image.” - Fidel López

Acrylic, Spray Paint and Markers on Canvas

60 × 91 in