Guilloche is the third part of a series on which Daniel García Andújar has been working since 2014, generically titled Capital. Merchandise. In the first part, he explored the transactions carried out in the so-called 'free information zones' of the Internet, also known as the 'deep web', a world associated with illicit and dissident activities, where payments are usually made in bitcoins. The project was created using images downloaded from these clandestine circuits and transferred onto paper, an approach the artist often uses. However, one of a number of new features in Guilloche is that here the artist eschews the appropriation of pre-existing materials, instead creating his own images using guilloche, a technique widely used in the manufacture of bank notes and other means of payment, in which a complex pattern is mechanically engraved onto a material in great precision and detail. Using computer software to reproduce this technique, the artist made eighteen digital prints as proofs for banknotes in which the drawing becomes progressively more complicated, generating images that are intended to hinder counterfeiting. This is one of the aspects that interests the artist, who explores the different anti-counterfeiting techniques used in the manufacture of paper money and turns them into objects of representation. They include steganography, the security thread and the EURion Constellation.

Historically, banknotes have also provided a canvas for the fine arts, as well as effectively conveying different ideas, depending on the themes illustrated. They contain careful iconographic repertoires that reflect the ideology of their time. In Guilloche, García Andújar has also created a peculiar iconography of today's world and its conflicts. Whereas the banknotes of the late nineteenth century used the image of the railway as the driving force of the industry of the time, the artist depicts armaments and security as the motors of today's globalised economy. Similarly, while banknotes used to feature effigies of eminent personalities, they are here replaced by anonymous cyborgs, clones destined to replace the labour force or desperate, marginalised subjects taken out of their social context. And whereas banknotes showed cornucopias or floral motifs, these tokens have here been replaced by hand grenades and fragments of industrial robots, emerging from these contemporary dollars and euros.

Yolanda Romero Gómez