Fernando Bryce’s drawings systematically re-examine the ways in which historical events are represented in print media. The process, which Bryce describes as “mimetic analysis” involves selecting archives such as advertisements, newspaper articles, and propaganda brochures to faithfully reproduce a selection of these materials, creating his own reconstructions. Les fusillés de Chateaubriant (2011) portrays the 27 hostages randomly chosen to be shot in Chateaubriant in 1941 as a result of the assassination of German officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hotz. In the list of hundreds of detainees presented by the Germans, the names were essentially those of the communists. Fascinated by the document, Bryce juxtaposed series of drawings reproducing the headlines from newspapers published in June 1944: Das Reich, a weekly propaganda newspaper founded by Goebbels, and Der Aufbau, a German Jewish newspaper later published in New York. With this artist, history appears not as a chronological sequence of facts but as something recomposed through the filter of authoritative media accounts.

Fernando Bryce’s drawings systematically re-examine the ways in which historical events are represented in print media. The process, which Bryce describes as “mimetic analysis” involves selecting archives such as advertisements, newspaper articles, and propaganda brochures to faithfully reproduce a selection of these materials, creating his own reconstructions. Les fusillés de Chateaubriant (2011) portrays the 27 hostages randomly chosen to be shot in Chateaubriant in 1941 as a result of the assassination of German officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hotz. In the list of hundreds of detainees presented by the Germans, the names were essentially those of the communists. Fascinated by the document, Bryce juxtaposed series of drawings reproducing the headlines from newspapers published in June 1944: Das Reich, a weekly propaganda newspaper founded by Goebbels, and Der Aufbau, a German Jewish newspaper later published in New York. With this artist, history appears not as a chronological sequence of facts but as something recomposed through the filter of authoritative media accounts.