The Banco de España Collection has 23 pieces by Diego Lara, from a series of collages on recycled cardboard. The series is built from black and white photos to which the artist has applied streaks of white oil paint. It showcases his modus operandi: his work as a collector of images, the simplicity of his compositions, his liking for the artisanal and his ability to generate versatile images based on the simplest elements and types. In this series of collages, Lara uses black and white landscape photos with pictures from other popular forms of expression such as comics and advertising, in compositions that incorporate such diverse elements as Mickey Mouse and an Alka-Seltzer ad. He produced several major series in the 1980s, including Untitled (Fortune) (1987), Untitled (Gran Vía) (1987) and Untitled (Chinese) (1988-1989). Lara was a renowned graphic designer, with thew result that his output as an artist was less prominent, more silent, in a position of 'invisibility' that he himself chose. However his collages and objects and the compositions he made with wax crayons, oils, cuttings and typefaces form a major legacy and provide an opening into the formal language he used as an artist. At the anthology of his work organised at the Casa Encendida venue in 2012, which featured around 100 collages, curator Amaranta Ariño said that Lara had a special ability to select typefaces and images and stressed his unique viewpoint and constant awareness of the world of images. To paraphrase historian Juan Manuel Bonet's comments on the posthumous exhibition of his work at the Buades Gallery in September and October 1992, he dealt in 'slivers of a work, cinders, almost nothing: they resist the passage of time. Somewhat like Schwitters' Merz and Cornell's boxes, Diago Lara's collages and objects are the outcome of an encounter with common materials, with objects with which he identifies and which he turns into pages in his diary'.

Beatriz Herráez