‘Art is in any kind of media’

by Anna-Louise Kratzsch

Osvaldo Budet brews a fresh Puerto Rican coffee, walks straight to a piece of work and starts talking about history and his life. A bike accident changed it completely.

Since then irony is one of the artists main tools. “Most art work is too serious,” he says. Gazing through his studio one sees Osvaldo Budet on the top of a pyramid formed by youngsters. The propaganda image was created during GDR times on a holiday called “The international day of youth against colonialism for peaceful co-existence“. “I found it close to the monument of the ‘Battle of the people’ at the outskirts of Leipzig in a nostalgic GDR shop, he replies. And can you believe it, it was in Spanish too, because Cuba was an ally of the GDR.” 

There is a gap being Puerto Rican, being an ‘American colony’, and now staying at a place where the communists ruled freely. It creates friction. On another image he seems to have missed interviewing the right Erich Honecker, the GDR’s last dictator, who is taking a bath in the masses. On the next picture he drives frenetically Fidel Castro’s Jeep or asks a soldier in uniform if he belongs to the German green party.

Osvaldo Budet has an obsession with documentary. He is history’s global reporter, asking the questions ever wanted to be asked. “You watch a documentary about something, anything, and you feel, there is no fantasy involved. That is where I start. I love documentaries, its ability to lie. Most people, I think, believe in what they see in films or on photographs. They think it is reality.”

Like Gerhard Richter he uses found documentary materials but he creates ironic realities with them. He paints them with black and white colors as a remembrance to photography and film or prints digital images, which he alters. His surfaces are made of stainless steel panels. The first coating of his images consists of iron-oxide then he paints with silver referring to celluloid. His materials refer to the quality of photo and film processing.

Osvaldo Budet sees himself as a person working for the media. He uses its features such as subtitles of poets or famous quotes by politicians, which he integrates into his works. “I love to steal the words from other people”, he replies and coats his painting with diamond dust. Andy Warhol used this material already in the Factory. Osvaldo Budet sees himself as a working class artist. The quality of diamond dust is ambiguous, luxurious on one side and used for producing blades on the other.

His historic and political characters are always recognizable. The photo was once the only true medium because it sees objectively. This was before it was used for propaganda purposes. But still, people believe in this feature no matter if a photo is brilliantly executed or not. Osvaldo Budet plays with the characteristics of photography, its aura as ‘vera icona’ as testimony of real life.

The artist acts with dictators or democrats, in the meantime asking himself what he did not know about himself. “My work is about my anxieties. I paint myself with people I do not want to be with but at the same time I am in that image. I love this contradiction. We do not trust them, so I make fun of them and me.” Later he drives away with Fidel Castro in his Jeep. His bike accident he left behind.                                                        

Text by Anna-Louise Kratzsch