Community of Owners, Apartments and Premises

As throughout the whole of the series Man and the City (El Hombre y La Ciudad), Community of Owners, Apartments and Premises (Comunidad de Propietarios, Apartamentos y Locales) features the homunculus—a being conceived by the painter as a materialization of her criticism around consumer life and of those she builds as reified beings composed of scrap materials from a technological world which eventually reaches humans. By assembling fragments of pipelines, pieces of brick, clock faces, light bulbs, pieces of cables, her characteristic sands, and other remnants from urban life, Francés creates the anatomy of these beings connected to the principals of New Realism and its defense of the "poetic recycling of the urban, industrial and advertising reality." The composition and title of this work allude to the idea of a block of flats, not as a place of coexistence but of ownership, where the homunculi directly face the spectator which inhibits interaction between the beings. They also appear perfectly arranged or, better put, classified within the spaces where they more closely resemble frozen modules, far from living things. This is not in vain, as Juana Francés noted that in her works she sought to "symbolize society, our society, where everything is archived, numbered, classified."