with a difference

Created through the Nick Novak Mid-Career Printmaker Residency (find out about our residencies here), the work in this exhibition presents an exploration of contemporary possibilities for printmaking as a conceptual tool. Playing with modes of inscription that range from the performative to the mechanical, printmaking allows Francisco-Fernando Granados to negotiate formal questions of difference and repetition within the context of the multiple.

Two new works present parallel strategies that stage perceptions of movement within a picture plane. mapa mundi (study for extended intersections) recontextualizes a key composition from the artist’s ongoing archive of more than 400 abstract drawings into a varied edition exploring different kinds of paper support, as well as hand-colouring. These drawings are developed digitally through the layering of gestures, resulting in interlocking geometries. Workbook (randomized) samples readymade elements excerpted from Guatemalan calligraphy workbooks authored by Jaime F. Sanchez into an all-over composition generated by an algorithm. The workbooks are familiar to the artist as part of his elementary education before coming to Canada.

For this body of work, Granados worked with Heather J. A. Thomson in order to experiment with photolithography, a technique not previously used in his practice. The study of other print techniques was integral to the artist’s formation at Langara College in Vancouver (unceded Coast Salish territories) during the mid-2000s. There, Granados learned intaglio and serigraphy under the supervision of Gordon Trick and Timothy Nash, while simultaneously taking drawing classes with Lesley Finlayson. These years in the drawing and printmaking studio taught him not just technique, but also patience, process, and a sense of being-in-community as an artist.

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Francisco-Fernando Granados was born in Guatemala and lives in Toronto, Dish With One Spoon Territory. Since 2005, his practice has traced his movement from convention refugee to critical citizen, using abstraction performatively, site-specifically, and relationally to create projects that challenge the stability of practices of recognition. His work has developed from the intersection of visual arts training, working in performance through artist-run spaces, studies in queer and feminist theory, and early activism as a peer support worker with immigrant and refugee communities. This layering of experiences has trained his intuitions to seek site-responsive approaches, alternative forms of distribution, and the weaving of lyrical and critical propositions. His exhibition project ‘who claims abstraction?’ is currently on view at Simon Fraser University Galleries in Vancouver. An accompanying book created with SFU and Publication Studio Vancouver, titled ‘who claims abstraction (with a difference)?’ will be released in July 2023.

Click here to watch a virtual Print Speak session about this exhibition.