Xavier Robles de Medina on Post-Colonial Memory and The Constructed Image.

Xavier traces his path from growing up in independent Suriname surrounded by his grandfather's art books and the quiet legacy of a sculptor who built the country's most iconic public monument — including setting up a bronze foundry from scratch, without an income, with a budget barely sufficient for the task — to working as a studio assistant for Takashi Murakami in New York, where he got his first real crash course in the commercial art world. He talks about what it meant to grow up in a post-colonial education system that never taught him the Dutch national anthem, and what it revealed when he moved to the Netherlands and found that his peers knew almost nothing about Suriname. He opens up about publishing his book Pengel, co-authored with his grandmother, to bring his grandfather's obscure international legacy into the light.And he digs into the works that have defined his recent practice: the Mangione portraits — those matter-of-fact colored pencil renderings of a face everyone has seen and no one knows — and the painting of the last U.S. soldier leaving Afghanistan, perfectly centered in a night-vision frame. These are meditations on what it means to see someone, to idolize someone, and to let an image carry the full weight of a historical moment.