The present research project explores the ways in which painting can function as an "allegorical machine," a sort of alchemy lab where the flux and experimentation with images can provoke unexpected interactions between memory and imagination. In a context in which this relation is threatened by the strong standardizing pressure of current digital networks of production and circulation of images, the aim of this project is to develop an artistic practice capable of turning mere accumulation into different forms of aggregation and encounter.

The working hypothesis that sustains this attempt lies in the assumption that such accumulation, usually referred as “media overload”, is not so much a problem of quantity but rather an issue about the redundant, cacophonic quality of the information that suffuses our everyday perception —pictures, documents, videos, data all around us. From this point of departure, the present research articulates a series of pictorial methodologies in which painting operates simultaneously under an archival logic as well as a practice that encourages speculative making and thinking. It is this twofold notion what triggers a pictorial synergy between memory and imagination, letting images to become, and eventually produce, “something other”.

Under these considerations, the present thesis is organised around three main chapters. The first section aims to outline the main motivations of this practice-based research project, which arose at the time of integrating an archival dimension into my painting practice. Originally formulated as a strategy to deal with a personal creative crisis I was going through, this approach consisted of rethinking the internal logic of those visual sources that used to serve as a model for my pictorial work. However, from its very onset, this process soon revealed itself as an autonomous side of my practice, which was also capable of embodying a series of large-scale questions about memory and imagination in today’s media culture, largely shaped by the standardizing influence of algorithms. In this regard, the chapter seeks to give an account of this influence in relation to contemporary forms production and circulation of images. By discussing how standardization operates as a profitable form of contemporary iconoclasm, this section explores the scope of the double pictorial-archival configuration of my artistic practice, insofar as it can offer a response to this form of damnatio memoriae.

The second chapter delves into the ways in which my practice began to shape this response, which broadly consisted of understanding archives as creative artifacts, not only oriented toward the preservation of the past but also to the production of the future. To that end, the second part of this thesis reviews the processes developed under this temporal layout, underpinned by a concept of record that was capable of incorporating the instability inherent in the highly personalized form of image production that painting entails. The analysis and evolution of these processes are exposed here according to some unexpected transformations in my own creative work, and how the fundamental reference of this research project began to become explicit in it: the work of the German historian Aby Warburg, and in particular, his famous, and to some extent still underappreciated, Atlas Mnemosyne project. The plurality of time both implied and provoked by Warburg’s approach to images is the model from which my own project seeks to devise ways of overthrowing the homogeneous and predictive logic that governs our current technological devices, provoking instead a vertigo whereby images exceed their own material, iconographic and epistemological limits, allowing all kinds of visual sources, previously considered unconnected or too distant, to resonate with each other. This second part of the thesis then seeks to expose the qualities of such an echoing reflection amid the unfamiliar in order to discover what determines the status of record in paintings, considering, as has been said, their highly personalized and unstable conditions of production.

Finally, the last section of the thesis is focused on reviewing the creative possibilities that arises from such instability, as they were specifically put in action in the context of a solo exhibition that I held by the end this research project. By resorting to what could tentatively be called a 'poetics of encounter', this exhibition became the instance in which I was able to escalate all the pictorial and archival experiments I conducted along the research, as well as to measure their possible future developments, inasmuch as it was the occasion to observe how such poetic powers can engender the new through the permanent search for a radical otherness within and between images. By drawing upon a speculative drive as a constructive mode that refutes the catastrophic bias that comes from the prevailing model of the obsolete and the new, the research has taken instead the elusive but composing capacity of an aggregative logic as an alternative to the barren and predictable quality of media accumulation.

The contribution that this project hopes to make consists of providing the methodological coordinates that have emerged throughout its development, and how they can be used as a sort of compass for navigating amidst the confusion of a global culture obsessed with the predictive mandate of its technological promises, yet increasingly confronted with the glaring evidence that the only secure prediction is that there may no longer be any world to be predicted. The allegorical machine can then be understood as a kit of possible exits from such enclosure, a poetic toolbox for all those who seek to overcome their creative self-fulfilling prophecies.