Fake News: 03.21-04.30.2020

Wilfredo Prieto (b. 1978, Sancti Spíritus, Cuba) wakes up, reads the news on his phone, and paints twelve headlines. He then hangs them at Galería Habana just before opening.

 The series is comprised of paintings that are a result of a rigorous daily exercise entailing the artist’s close read of the national and international news. He then interprets the information (or misinformation) of that mornings’ media through painting, titling each with the headline that it is in response to. The process transforms the news into pictorial abstractions, whereby one representation of reality is translated into another.

With this series, Prieto returns to painting, a historically traditional medium, and takes up its conventions to experiment with the established mechanisms of representation in art and their implications today. He investigates from the visual arts the way in which we estimate the environment, interpret events, filter changing information, and manipulate reality, all with an awareness of media saturation.

Prieto’s methodology of Fake News, exalts the plasticity of information and consciously emphasizes the process of perception in which information is reinterpreted into its own form, a new code. This game invites us to question the consensuses that we have assumed as truths before accepting lies - false information we have allowed our emotional rather than intellectual selves to internalize as truth.