Phoenix 24
An immersive journey that fuses illustration, biography, and performance to reawaken the past through the present.
Málaga, October 2025
The city of Málaga is preparing for a creative rendezvous as Argentine illustrator Miguel Rep arrives to lead performative lectures, live drawing sessions, and a special homage to Pablo Picasso. This multi-dimensional event is set within the context of Bienalsur 2025, blending visual narrative, history and spatial dialogue to animate the past through contemporary eyes. Rep’s performances will debut on November 20 at the Centro Pompidou Málaga, following a precursor event at Picasso’s birthplace museum where “Animating History: Miguel Rep at Casa Natal Picasso” will open.
Rep’s reputation rests on his singular approach to storytelling: he draws as he speaks. In his “conferences performáticas,” he sketches in real time while weaving micro-narratives that link art history to social currents. His series Bellas Artes serves as his foundational reference: six chapters dedicated to major artists, three of which focus on Picasso. In Málaga, Rep intends to engage physically with Picasso’s legacy, not just by illustrating it, but by building a perpetual exchange across time.
The mural-like exhibition in Picasso’s birthplace museum is staged so that Rep’s animated drawings integrate into García’s spaces, inviting visitors to experience both Picasso’s life and Rep’s interpretations in dialogue. According to the curatorial team, the tone aims to be simultaneously epic and human: each micro-story emerges from fluid sketches but carries undercurrents of historical urgency. Rep does not simply draw Picasso; he portrays the evolution of how Picasso saw himself, layering public myth and personal struggle.
This intersection of narrative, image, and place is central to Rep’s philosophy. He believes that history is never static — it is composed of living stories that can be “played” in the making. In that view, art is not a relic but a conversation. His Málaga program, which links lecture, animation, spatial installation, and performative drawing, seeks to awaken that conversation anew in Picasso’s hometown.
Bienalsur’s framework amplifies the gesture. The “Let’s Play – Juguemos en el mundo” curatorial program, under which Rep performs, positions playful confrontation at the heart of cultural dialogue. In the 2025 edition, titled “Infancias,” the biennial unites works from global artists exploring memory, childhood, fragmentation, and repetition. Rep’s performance sits at the convergence: drawing in public acts as both homage and critique, as an invitation to traverse past and present.
In broader terms, the Málaga project reflects current debates in art about how to animate history without fossilizing it. For Rep, the artist’s role is that of a mediator who revitalizes silences, interstitial gaps, and incomplete stories. His method challenges museum norms by insisting that archives, biographical myth, and spectatorship all interchange in verbal-visual tension. He seeks to disrupt passive viewing with action and transformation.
The trajectory of Rep’s work from 1993 onward feeds into this moment. His book Bellas Artes and its animated adaptation expanded his audience across media. Cerro, Madrid, Buenos Aires — he has traversed cultural landscapes always bringing the same spirit: history reshaped through narrative, myth turned animate, memory as medium. Málaga is, in many ways, a culminating chapter, given its intrinsic connection to Picasso’s own passage between tradition and rupture.
How audiences will respond remains to be seen. Some visitors will come drawn by Picasso’s aura, others by the magnetism of performance drawing. But Rep’s intent is not to capture a static impression of Picasso; rather, to unsettle it, reframe it, and allow visitors agency in the unfolding. The risk is deliberate: suspending certainty in favor of poetic uncertainty. When an artist draws history live, history becomes provisional again.
Málaga, Picasso’s birthplace, becomes a stage for that uncertainty. As Rep sketches in concert with the museum’s presence, he embodies the tension between legacy and invention. He is not a retrospector, but a storyteller whose pen engages with footsteps, walls, shadows.
Whether Rep’s animations will reshape how locals and visitors see Picasso, or how art history feels when it’s alive rather than archived, remains open. But what is certain is that in Málaga the past will no longer rest passively — it will be remade in gesture, line, and voice.
Phoenix24: clarity in the grey zone. / Phoenix24: claridad en la zona gris.