lázaro martínez durán
video ergo sum
In Lázaro Martínez Durán’s work, creating first and foremost means observing. The world unfolding before his eyes is thus frozen within his television sets. As if to interrupt—if not master—this incessant flow, the narrative energy he deploys is immediately legible: crowds, cities, public figures, and demonstrations form a kaleidoscope in which the collective prevails.
On the screen, the image is framed, doubled, and displayed. His universe is no longer merely represented: it is filtered and recomposed. By combining line work with press fragments, and by weaving subtle links between international history and scenes of everyday life, Lázaro Antonio Martínez Duran creates, using printed images, an unstable form of current events—a kind of projected diary in which reality becomes montage, where propaganda is subverted. For he does not document: he edits.
Everything in his work seems to draw on the codes of Pop Art: modern icons, collage, frontality. Yet where Pop introduced distance and irony, Lázaro engages in a more direct appropriation. The images are not commented upon; they are underscored by his drawings in order to be more fully absorbed. The shift into three dimensions—television sets assembled from cardboard and discarded materials—further intensifies this displacement: the media object is reconstructed within a fragile, domestic, almost precarious economy.
In the background, Cuba emerges. Gatherings, collective tensions, but also the ambivalent role of mass media channels, caught between information and staging. The screen thus becomes a space of negotiation, where a personal version of Cuban society takes shape, between lived experience and imagination. Ultimately, Lázaro Duran does not seem to use the archive as a critical tool to deconstruct a discourse, but rather to move beyond the status of witness to which he feels confined, and to take part, in his own way, in the spectacle of the world.