Valdés found the source material for 'Egon I' while scrolling Instagram. With a quick look, he understood the image to be of a man sleeping. On later examination of the caption, he realised the figure is not asleep but dead: Egon Schiele, photographed on his deathbed in 1918 during the influenza pandemic.

This moment of delayed recognition constitutes the conceptual core of the work.

Valdés painted the entire Instagram post preserving image, caption, interface, metadata, and graphic structure, but did so with a fractured realism that fragments into noisy imperfections, like a screenshot breaking down into painterly gesture. What is typically consumed in a second is materially slowed. The painting resists the velocity of the feed and asks the viewer to linger, decode, and confront the image gradually.

Coincidence and internal echo further structure the work. Details embedded in the post resonate with other paintings in the exhibition, including references to Leonard Bernstein, whom Valdés had previously depicted. Even the framing evokes the durational logic and mediated gaze associated with Andy Warhol’s film language–another artist who explored repetition, celebrity, and the transformation of life into image.

In 'Egon I', time collapses. The early twentieth century meets the algorithmic present. Death becomes scrollable. Art history becomes an interface. And through paint, the image–once flattened into a post–is slowed, reconsidered and recovered.