What is striking about walking among works of American Pop Art is the emptiness of the images, which do not intrinsically entail the accusatory charge that too many critics and historians have conferred upon them. Their objective neutrality, which accentuates the absence of pictoriality, abolishes the very possibility of an accusation, reducing them to nothing more than a decontextualized reproduction of images from advertising propaganda, objects of mass consumption. mass culture (comics, cinema, celebrity...), and mass media (tabloids and press, cinema...). Torn from their historical context, they have nothing more to say to us, and speak to us less than Cycladic or Mayan sculptures, which are nevertheless more distant.
Conversely, while there is indeed a decontextualization in the art of Maria Dávila Guerra-in this instance film images from the 1960s, photos from an anonymous family from the 1940s to the 1960s-it makes room for the humanity that is specific to a work of spirit through the mediation of the hand. Setting out from the same premise as Pop Art (the reproduction of a reproducible image), the artist from Andalusia goes beyond a foolishly intellectual protocol and the conceptual pomposity that surrounds mediocre art. Her "images of images" surpass their subject or the affirmation of their status as a copy, because their pictoriality (effects of the material, traces of work done by hand...) thickens their strangeness, and provides matter for being moved, for (self) reflection and remembering oneself-for the experience of being.
Often concentrating on the human figure, her paintings show instants, like sudden flashes from childhood that spark memory, like buried trauma. Scenes with swings or playgrounds, family moments, conversation, trips to the country: extracted from their context (the privacy of family photos, the narrative account of a film), they take on another life. The character from a film becomes an individual, an alter ego, while real people become characters. Offhand gestures become charged with melancholy; an actor's codified and artificial game transforms into the capture of distress, melancholy, and fear using paint.
Through the very artificiality of painting, as well as works peopled with ghostly characters, Maria Dávila Guerra confusedly offers for our understanding the entire theatricality of social life, the inexplicable mystery that represents the Other, the insurmountable distance, the game of masks. For humans, that social animal according to Aristotle, cannot escape the fatality that prompted the Hungarian poet Attila József to write: "You plunge your face into yourself in vain/ You will only be able to clean it in the other."
