Mgarciavalino
M.García-Valiño is a visual art practice that dismantles urban photographs into abstract topographies, exploring the layered relationship between materials, time, and memory. The practice combines analog and digital techniques in a "digital darkroom," producing works from small giclée prints to three-meter installations. Its ongoing "Vida útil" series quantifies the ratio between a material's geological age and its service life, such as 310,035:1 for upholstery leather.
- Creator / Creative Economy
- Content & Publishing
- Media & Entertainment
Funding
Founders
Founder details are not available yet.
Product
Problem
Traditional urban photography often remains tied to documentary representation, limiting the viewer's experience to literal records of place rather than deeper explorations of memory, time, and material transformation. This approach can fail to capture the layered, palimpsest-like nature of cities where histories and meanings continuously overlap and evolve.
Solution
M.García-Valiño offers a visual art practice that dismantles urban photographs until they become abstract topographies—works where the image ceases to be mere documentation and instead becomes an event, a trace, a vestige of a constantly mutating landscape. Through a process defined as a "digital darkroom," the artist layers analog and digital techniques with extensive post-production to create pieces ranging from 17 centimeters to 3 meters in scale. The practice integrates writing, with exhibition texts published in their original language, and culminates in large-format printing and artist book binding. The 2025 exhibition "The Vast Within" at Galería del Paseo presented 25 works created between 2024 and 2025, curated by Jacqueline Lacasa, who frames the city as a palimpsest where traces of time dialogue across layers of memory, matter, and light. The ongoing "Vida útil" series confronts the discomfort of oversimplified complex problems with verifiable numbers, quantifying the ratio between a material's geological age and its service life.
Target Audience
Primary audience includes contemporary art collectors, gallery visitors, curators, and art institutions interested in photography-based abstract work that explores urban memory, materiality, and geological time, particularly within Latin American and international art circuits.
Features
- Deconstructive photographic method that transforms urban imagery into abstract topographies through multiple exposures of the same place in a single frame
- Multi-layered post-production workflow combining analog capture, digital processing, and iterative layer building in a "digital darkroom"
- Scale-varied output from 0.17-meter giclée prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag to three-meter large-format installations, presented in proportion to actual size
- "Vida útil" series quantifying the ratio between a material's geological age and its service life, with ratios such as 310,035:1 for upholstery leather and 15 million:1 for Ligurian slate
- Artist book production involving large-format printing and hand binding as part of the creative process
- Exhibition-specific curation, as demonstrated by the 25-work solo show "The Vast Within" with curatorial texts by Jacqueline Lacasa and Mariela Yeregui published in original languages
- Carbon accounting that tracks the emissions cost of imposing service life onto geological materials, without printing it