¡Buenos Días, Dictador!

 

Seven paintings on linen in acrylic and paper collage, steeped in the atmosphere of growing up in the shadow of an unspoken dictatorship. In this series, Boué explores the emotional geography of family exile and seeks to recover aspects of personal and historic memory (memoria histórica), erased from official memory in Spain by political suppression. Here, a previous focus on the narrative histories of the Retirada (the republican retreat from Spain) and the British involvement in the Civil War shifts to her own memory sites  - journeys to Spain from England in the 1960s and 1970s.

The paintings form imaginary landscapes and scenarios; collaged figures of small children, adolescents and adults, summon Boué's school days in Birmingham and holidays in Barcelona, where she visited her Spanish grandparents. They offer vignettes through which to examine the fabric of her family's life with new eyes.

“The dictator was everywhere, silently and invisibly setting the preconditions of our lives.”

The spirit of these works is nostalgic yet oddly confrontational. With this juxtaposition of painted and collaged elements, Boué reaches towards the seemingly unspeakable, to tease at the invisibility cloak of Franco’s rule and ask how life carries on in the face of a dictatorship and political exile.

In these works, the dictator is everywhere and yet nowhere to be seen. Cut-out figures from the period are borrowed from sewing pattern illustrations, transplanted to imprecise geographical locations - dreamscapes that conjure a surreal and dissonant atmosphere.

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