Equipo Crónica (1965-1981) recontextualised iconography and images from the history of art and the history of Spain so that they coexisted with features from popular art and the mass media. This should be no surprise, given that Equipo Crónica was an offshoot of the Estampa Popular group in Valencia. The use of these images established a connection not just with a commitment in regard to the mass media, consumerism and their dissemination as clichés of popular culture but also with events from the history of Spain which were being used as propaganda by the Franco regime.

Equipo Crónica used both two-dimensional works —acrylic paint and graphic arts— and sculpture, mainly in plasterboard but towards the end of the group's lifetime also in fibreglass. Art (1975) belongs to the series Seeing and Doing Painting (1976). Via a number of elements that play metonymic roles, it sums up different beliefs as to what ‘art’ means: a technical production, a history of the art shown in museums and schools, the generation of specific conceptual and plastic arts discourses, etc. It does this by taking a common instrument in the production of works of plastic art: a draughtsman's triangle of the kind widely used in works by Giorgio de Chirico such as The Mask (1959). It is shown floating over a white surface together with a slide of Velázquez's The Spinners (a common teaching aid in schools at that time), a line of colours, a sheet torn from a ring binder bearing the word 'art' and two objects commonly associated with artists on whom Equipo Crónica were fixated: a pipe from the synthetic cubism of Picasso (though it could also be a reference to This is Not a Pipe by Magritte) and parallel coloured lines à la James Rosenquist. Their signature brushstroke appears above the 'Ben-Day dots' that became the trade mark of Roy Lichtenstein. A humorous touch is the addition of a string of conceptual echoes that write the word passepartout around the outside of the picture, just where the mounting card that protects the work should go.

Another work by Velázquez also served as a model for sculptures by Equipo Crónica. The work in question here is Don Sebastián de Morra (1980), after the Velázquez painting of the same name, which depicted a dwarf who was employed as a fool at the court of Philip IV. This work is linked to a series of small-scale sculptures made in plasterboard and polychromed using acrylic paint. Almost as a joke, each one uses different references in its decoration: some —such as the piece in the Banco de España Collection— recall the works of Velázquez; others contain nods to Picasso's Three Musicians and other artists to which Equipo Crónica resorted as references. This piece is polychromed stone, which makes it a rarity in the output of Equipo Crónica. In 1982, after the death of Rafael Solbes, the Maeght Gallery produced a multiple of fifteen pieces in fibreglass from this same series, each one with different colours and designs.

Isabel Tejeda