The exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: The Use of Images at Fundación Juan March in Madrid unfolds a bold and luminous museography, where open wooden frameworks evoke a stage under construction, highlighting the transient nature of art and identity alike, offering a curatorial approach that merges the personal with the collective through a relational portrait of the artist; rather than a fixed self-representation, the show presents a polyphonic self-portrait shaped through youth, queer intimacy, and interdisciplinary collaboration, where figures such as Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham, and the artist himself appear not as icons but as living nodes in a network of aesthetic and affective exchange; in this constellation, archival photographs—such as Rauschenberg crouched in worn clothes or standing beside a target painting—become temporal mirrors, capturing both vulnerability and artistic intent, signaling a porous boundary between the body and the object, between gaze and gesture; emblematic is the graphic from the Moderna Museet show in Stockholm (1982), a historical marker that grounds the global circulation of his work and persona; these images and materials are activated by a museographic strategy that is lightweight, fresh, and transparent, allowing each piece to breathe and engage in silent dialogue with the visitor, who becomes not just an observer but a participant in the unfolding visual narrative; in this way, the exhibition becomes a stage where ephemerality becomes presence, and portraiture is redefined as an assemblage of traces, interactions, and unfinished performances.
