It was during his one-year stay in the Midwest in 2004 (Colombus, Ohio) that Carlos Aires suddenly became aware, like so many other expatriates, of the central role played by the computer in our everyday management of information and communication. Messages, chats, forums, online press, photo albums, research and entertainment: everything ended up in one way or another on the screen of his portable. The paradox of the Internet (or its richness, depending on how you look at it) lies in its ability to provide, at the same time, information and the means to dissect it. And a chance to notice the gulf which sometimes (often?) separates data from their sources – for instance, the gulf the article boasting of the merits of American soldiers in combat and the clandestine video placed online by a marine which reveals the crude reality of the war in Iraq (we will come back to this). According to Carlos Aires, behind every truth on which official history is based is another kind of truth; behind every winner is a loser, and behind every fairytale prince is a dwarf. Under the generic title Happily Ever After, these great photographs summarise his outlook perfectly: while everybody is convinced that these small persons are disguised for the occasion, even though this is not true (they are simply displaying their social status and profession), nobody notices that the “fake” side is the décor, these heavy black frames which in fact were moulded by the artist from plastic resin. Apart from the irony-tinged homage to the Spanish 17th century masters, the series questions our ability to manipulate stereotypes and to separate the real from the fake – and underlines the ambiguity of the frames, the bourgeois symbol par excellence which is always excluded from official art history book. >>