Maria Tinaut

Region: South

My practice focuses on the analysis of graphic and pictorial vocabularies found in photocopies and photographs from my family archive. The content of this source material becomes the subject matter of my work.

Copy machines are essential instruments in the process of generating images, providing them with a vocabulary and with autonomy in relation to the originals. Photographs and photocopies are both my starting point and medium. The images’ established limits and possibilities are redefined, altered, and increased by the machine. Thus, the original (be it a document or a photograph) is turned into a reproduction, and the reproduction becomes an original itself through the processes of deconstruction, decontextualization, fragmentation, and enlargement. Throughout, a relationship between the formal and the casual, control and chance, is evident.

I challenge the relevance of the images’ original meanings and contexts, interrogate the links between painting and photography and between originals and reproductions, and reveal the originality of a reproduction.