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Trained as a historian, Vicente Pla Vivas has for a long time been interested in the study of the image as a cultural document and a testimony of the mentality of an age. He has carried out especially dedicated research into modern uses of the popular engraving and specific investigations into Catalan aucas or rhyming comics, caricatures, the tradition of the ‘upside-down world’ and its costumbrista iconography. As a historian, he shows figures from the past as if they were alive and in their place, in their contradictory present, unyielding to causal demonstrations and to the comprehensive cloisters of the past event. He uses visual documents not to illustrate current historical categories but rather, quite the opposite, to call upon them to give an account of the figure in question.
Graphic illustration in the 19th century. functional and dysfunctional elements]