MACGUFFIN

From Monster to Ghost

1.
The drama of the monster lies in knowing that it is made up of pieces from hundreds of corpses. Its organs were once the organs of others, which is why a single DNA cannot be attributed to its body. But also—and probably for that very reason—anyone can imagine a carved-up monster, divided into parts. The case of the ghost is exactly the opposite: no one can imagine a carved-up ghost. No one can even conceive of what the pieces of a ghost would look like—a mobile mass which, even though it may have a clear and well-defined form, appears like smoke, like a flow that no one can grasp. If the nature of the monster is corpuscular, that of the ghost is fluid. And how is it possible to chop up, cut, or assemble the parts of a fluid? It seems impossible, but let’s not be so quick to answer.

2.
To centre the topic: what is a MacGuffin? Although widely known, it’s worth recalling that the term was coined by Alfred Hitchcock to describe an element that drives a plot forward, with the peculiarity that its true nature is never revealed. It serves merely as an excuse to build the story, even though its presence is essential for the narrative to unfold. The archetypal case is the briefcase with secret documents, around which a suspenseful plot is woven—a series of comings and goings, with the case passing from hand to hand while the real story plays out elsewhere.

The MacGuffin exhibition by artist José Fiol, presented at the Fran Reus Gallery, consists of paintings based on details from films. In other words, fragments of much larger frames, which can be understood as an interpretation of this narrative mechanism transposed into painting. The appropriation and subsequent redefinition carried out by the artist is subtle: the original frames serve merely as the excuse that caused these paintings to exist. They are the triggers Fiol uses to tell us what he really wants to say. These frames, even while present, remain hidden from our view—MacGuffins in their own right. In this sense, Fiol’s paintings, while clearly figurative, dive headfirst into conceptual mechanics.

3.
What the artist reveals here, in another layer of meaning, is something that has always been present but needed his gaze to bring it to light: the history of painting—regardless of its period, school, or movement—is also the story of the MacGuffin. Indeed, Velázquez stages a live scene—take his paradigmatic Las Meninas with the attending courtiers—and this theatrical performance is later transformed into the canvas we know today. In light of Fiol’s work, it becomes clear that the court scene was simply the living material the painter used to advance the story he wanted to tell. That scenario, once used as a MacGuffin, disappears once the painting is completed.

But most contemporary painting no longer uses live scenes as its model. It uses other pre-existing images. From Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (inspired not by the original but by a postcard from a souvenir shop) to recent digital works—regardless of their attachment to NFT uniqueness—it is clear that none of these could exist without graphic predecessors. This shifts the nature of the “excuse-objects,” the MacGuffins of today’s artists, because—here lies the real shift—now the referent, the original image that sparked the creative process, still exists. We can go back and compare.

We cannot revisit the scene that served as MacGuffin for Manet to paint Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, because that scene no longer exists. But we can revisit the Campbell’s soup cans, or The Village of the Damned, which inspired a series of paintings by Luc Tuymans.

This fact—seemingly minor but actually transformative—obviously has its roots in the idea of chain reproducibility, as theorised by Walter Benjamin in the early 20th century. In today’s image-saturated world, where everything is photographed, this becomes an absolute modus operandi. (After all, what is Google Earth if not the ancient and impossible dream of a 1:1 mirror of the planet?) This forces us into a new construction of reality, one that José Fiol taps into: what matters and challenges us is not the emulation of something that has disappeared, but how we introduce a modification—a “positive error”—into a pre-existing image that we have arbitrarily chosen to consider original.

In other words, using the original image in such a way that the final work is autonomous enough to speak for itself constitutes a true decontextualisation—without erasing its origin.

In this mechanism—typically appropriationist and firmly situated within the current trend of recycling cultural residue—the MacGuffin functions as active cultural debris. Today, the legitimacy and relevance of a painting is debated within this framework, regardless of whether it is considered figurative or not. One might even ask whether all painting, no matter how abstract, is not ultimately always figurative—since otherwise, the brain wouldn’t even be able to process it. But let’s move on.

4.
There is a legal figure, as powerful as it is little known, called terra nullius: a Latin term denoting land that belongs to no one, has no ownership, and is literally “no man’s land.” Only two such territories exist on Earth. One is in Antarctica, and the other is a large area called Bir Tawil, located between Egypt and Sudan. Paradoxically, although it is suitable for human habitation, it belongs to no country and is claimed by no state—apart from symbolic political or artistic experiments like micronations.

How is it possible for a piece of land to exist with no owner, neither public nor private? How is it possible, then, for a land to have only one border—cross it, and beyond that line lies legal and social nothingness, human nothingness? For all practical purposes, it is extraterrestrial territory. Just thinking about it sends a ghostly chill down the spine.

However, terra nullius can also be the raw material for a certain artistic technique. We refer again to appropriationism, which gives new meaning to reality by using pre-existing material as if it were truly a no man’s land. In this exhibition, José Fiol focuses on a detail—an apparently residual subterritory of a film frame—a detail that, from a semantic and semiotic point of view, has no owner. Within the “planet of cinema,” it has no entity of its own: it is terra nullius. Fiol isolates it and paints it, allowing it to express something on its own and gain emotional and artistic value.

What was once a mere sliver of celluloid or pixels becomes a net body. The monster has turned into a ghost.

Because now we see how these paintings by José Fiol enact a subtle dynamic—both technical and conceptual—through which what was once a lost detail, a fragment of something greater, something born of a dramatic separation, something with the status of a monster, becomes, on his canvas, an autonomous image, a distinct identity: a ghost in its own right.

And it is worth remembering that “ghost” comes from the Greek word φάντασμα (phantasma), meaning “an apparition from the unknown sent to warn us of something.”
What these paintings by José Fiol are warning us about is left for each viewer to decide.