Miguel Aguirre

One of the reasons I consciously chose to work in painting is that you can’t use it only as a medium. It has this historical connotation, and either you want or you don’t want it. So if you paint, you should make use of that. It’s inherent to the medium, and it’s very important. If you don’t want it, take another medium. It’s as simple as that. Therefore this dialogue with other painting is to me very essential.”
Michaël Borremans, 2007

Every once in a while the background of my art education and my love for painting make me “recognize” traces or even concrete works of specific artists in images I come across.

Thirteen painters is a set of small, medium, and large sized paintings of images extracted from newspapers, mainly from the Politics section. Rather than the source image’s original caption, each work’s title consists of a figurative painter’s name: Leon Golub, Alex Katz, Gerhard Richter, Simeón Saiz Ruiz, Luc Tuymans and other contemporary artists I admire and who have doubtlessly influenced certain moments of my artistic production. With their individual particularities quite a few of them have established patterns which help understand the ways of today’s painting practice.