SALVADOR DIAZ

My artistic practice explores the intersections of time, memory, and image through painting. Working across different bodies of work, I draw from visual archives, including press materials, family photographs, classical artworks, and my studio surfaces, as sources to be reinterpreted. Oil painting functions not only as representation but as a method of inquiry, ethical positioning, and re-signification.
In the Newspapers series, I paint over articles and headlines, transforming fleeting news into enduring visual narratives. These works slow down the news cycle, questioning how events are constructed, perceived, and remembered.
Family Album, begun in 1997, seeks to recover the overlooked past of my middle-class family in Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake. Using Polaroid photographs, I translate scenes of everyday life into large-scale expressionist paintings, turning photographic memory into an emotional, painterly reconstruction.
In Displacements, I reflect on the artist as observer and traveler by re-situating fragments of Western art history within my own geographic and cultural experience. These conceptual shifts extend the temporality of classical images and connect them to my family history of migration from the UK and Spain to the Americas.
With Panoramics, I create large-scale immersive installations that surround the viewer, introducing embodiment and theatricality into the act of seeing. The spectator becomes an active participant within the pictorial space.
Finally, Work Tables / Coordinates turns toward the painting process itself. These abstract works map time and labor, with color structures referencing previously painted press themes. Here, abstraction functions as an archive of artistic memory.
Overall, my work resists immediacy, seeking instead to build a deep temporal architecture around painting, one that explores displacement and invites reflection on the relationship between personal and collective memory.


For more information please visit
www.diazsalvador.com
linked below.