Milicià ferit: el rescat d'una obra insalvable

Milicià ferit, by Francisco Mateos, is a propaganda painting conceived to denounce the cruelty of the Civil War and exalt fraternity among soldiers.

It was created in a context of urgency, with precarious means and reused materials, with the intention of participating in the Spanish Republican Pavilion for the 1937 International Exhibition, where Picasso's Guernica was also exhibited.

But since its return from Paris in 1938 it has never been possible to exhibit it: during the Francoist dictatorship, because it was part of the silenced art of the vanquished and, afterwards, because it was already deeply damaged.

Its deterioration is irreversible and progressive, and the losses it contains make it impossible to recover its original reading.

Faced with this impediment, we propose to recreate what it was like through images generated by artificial intelligence with the desire to restore, as far as possible, the expressive force of the message that the artist wanted to convey.

Francisco Mateos joined two of his own paintings together to build a larger canvas on which to represent the Wounded Militiaman.

This reuse, added to the poverty of the materials used and possibly hurried work, have favoured certain chemical reactions that cause the continuous flaking of the paint.

The deterioration it suffers cannot be remedied and the losses cannot be restored without incurring invention or the introduction of foreign material. It is for this reason that the work is presented tilted and is kept under constant observation.