Marcos López

Another prevailing visual characteristic in the works exhibited is a scenographic and almost performative quality. The poetics of the gesture and the emphasis on a transcendent pose are a language in themselves, and the objects included function as ele- ments in a vocabulary that articulates that language. Charged with reverie and Churrigueresque elaborateness, the artist’s works show a wild and genuine Latin America, an archetypal image of the countries that compose it.

In his black and white portraits we find the first signs of a code that shifts indistinctly from the aesthetic to a new dimension of the social, exalting a critical and affective consciousness of the image; an ideal setting, consolidated in the “Pop Latino” and “Sub realismo criollo” series. In those series, Marcos López captures the ordinary occurrences of life, the abyss, the bottom, the passion revealed by the body and the gaze. Amid isolated fig- ures or family groups − Asado en Mendiolaza, Amanda − there emerge solitary individualities that do not socialize in spite of their proximity; petrified, they stare seriously at the lens.

Those same characteristics may be observed in the remarkable photographs produced after his trip to Bolivia. The gallery also showcased three magnificent works from this series. A note- worthy example was Familia de sastres (Family of tailors) − La Paz, Bolivia 2010 −; posing in their shop, the look in the eyes of the characters is a decisive factor, but the photographer transcends the immediacy of the body and delves into a spirit of survival. López condenses in an elementary and radical way a feeling and a raison d’être. The human characters are there, in the ghostly quality of the photograph and in the sobriety that reaches the depths of affections, the interior of the soul. Unlike the characters in the series “Pop Latina”, who overact their pose, the tailors adopt a calm posture and look, but at the same time they are much more enigmatic.

“Tierra en Trance” takes us the Latin American land, to its myths, its lines of fracture, its limitless promise. It functions as a mirror that distorts its identity tensions. A herald of its ‘Latin soul’, a receptacle for its myths, a portrayer of that other con- quering “New World”, Marcos López experiences and conveys those tensions through infinite variations. An artist of “excess”, in the course of his different artistic peri- ods Marcos López has created a unique oeuvre based on his confrontations with Latin American and Argentine history, politics, culture, and religion. Throughout his career, he has allowed his life experiences at different times and in different places to inspire his works, which have various readings from the technical and the conceptual point of view. With his well-defined inventiveness and style, in the framework of installations organized in a ritual manner, he impregnates the deities with new power, as is the case of the outstanding Héroes y santos, Bolivar y las Tres Potencias. Nobody is safe from his sarcastic wittiness; his is a kingdom of fantasy in which everybody is present.

Always creative and full of contrasts, he continues to observe the world around him with imagination and humor, and exploring new technical approaches to provide his characters with their extraordinary environments. The colorful personalities invented by Marcos López frolic in his strange landscapes and are seductively attractive, yet it is difficult to distinguish between the mythical, the historical and reality, in such a way that in his works, truth may be stranger than fiction. Combining classical mythology, African fables, and history, López pretends to show through his photographs “the fabric of developing countries”, the “mestizo” America, and his personal vision of the Argentine identity and its traditions.