Hyper-Realist Mirrors: Exequiel Martinez’s Oil Paintings as Testimonies of the Air Battle Over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands

This paper examines how artists create the past. It analyses the aeronautic works of art by Captain Exequiel Martínez as portrayed and used by the painter, the Argentine Air Force and the Argentine officers who took part of the air battle for the Malvinas/Falklands in 1982. Unlike the dominant views condemning the armed initiative of the last Argentine dictatorship (1976–83), this paper delves into the military worldview and reconstructs the premises through which the Argentine Air Force and a pilot-painter have managed to pay homage, acknowledge, and make visible the feats of the Argentine pilots against the British Task Force. Taking advantage of an anthropology of the production of history, the author unravels the process undergone by painter Martínez and the pilots portrayed in his paintings to turn Argentine defeat into visual evidence, solid experience and historical plausibility.