IVAN FRANCO FRAGA

At first glance, Iván Franco’s works appear to be photographs. The artist deliberately sustains this ambiguity, playing with the viewer’s perception. Yet these are drawings. Far from resting on technical virtuosity alone, Franco embraces this confusion and places it at the heart of his practice. It is precisely in this subtle shift in perception that a central concern of his work emerges: to transform the act of looking into an experience that is both visual and reflective.

A photograph. A portrait. Yet this initial impression is only a point of departure. As it begins to unravel, our perception of the work shifts, along with our way of looking. Drawn first to the image as a whole, the eye moves closer, lingering over minute details and attending to the precision of the artist’s hand. The portrait gradually resolves into its constituent parts: a strand of hair, the fold of a shirt, the trace of a drawn line. What initially appeared to be a seamless image begins to reveal the means of its own making. The drawing’s material presence and the gestures through which it takes shape slowly emerge, bringing the process of representation itself into view.

By allowing us to glimpse how an image is made, Iván Franco shifts our attention from what we see to how it is brought into being. Looking becomes an act of discovery, shaped by moments of recognition, uncertainty and surprise. What matters is no longer simply identifying what is depicted, but becoming aware of how we look at images, how we read them, and why we trust what they show us.

This inquiry takes on particular significance in a contemporary landscape saturated with images, where their accelerated circulation increasingly blurs the boundaries between document, interpretation and fiction. With the emergence of generative AI, questions of authenticity and the image’s capacity to bear witness to reality have become ever more pressing. Rather than diminishing their power, these shifts bring into sharper focus the role

images play in shaping our perception of the real and the imaginaries through which we make sense of the world.

Against the accelerating flow of images, Iván Franco’s practice establishes a different temporality, grounded in slowness and sustained attention. Each drawing bears witness to a meticulous process, attuned to the most subtle variations of light, texture and form, and to the artist’s prolonged engagement with his subject. Slowness here is more than a condition of technical precision; it is integral to the work’s very conception. Through the sustained act of drawing, Franco resists the immediacy that characterises contemporary visual culture, opening up a space in which looking becomes an experience of duration, attention and renewed presence.

Images have a particular relationship with absence. They preserve fleeting moments, give form to memory, and evoke sensations, making tangible what lies beyond our immediate experience. What emerges is neither quite reality nor pure illusion, but an in-between space where the image becomes a site of sensory experience. In Ivan Franco’s work, presence thus operates on several levels: in the artist’s gesture, the subject as it is depicted, and the viewer’s gaze.