Marcos López
Santa Fe, Argentina, 1954
Few artists manage to do what Marcos López has achieved: to adopt the syntax of the iconic. The development of his works does not only stage a style or a poetics but mobilizes a whole imaginary through which one can return to themes such as national identity, the power of artifice, or Latin American aesthetic traditions. Seen from afar, his work can be thought of as a strange advertising campaign for a product that is as splendid as it is suspicious: Argentina and the Third World. In this sense, one of the great achievements of his photographic pieces and installations lies in the ambiguity with which they are tinged. When confronted with his pieces, the viewer may encounter both the euphoric or festive tone of a celebration, as well as layers of light that reveal an undisguisable world of poverty and precariousness.
His highly theatrical scenes, always staged and directed by himself, added to the chromatic saturation, earned him the reputation as the creator of Latin Pop, an aesthetic both personal and popular. It opens the possibility of a stark reflection, not without humor, on the local reality, its daily ceremonies, its daily religiosity. His works have been exhibited around the world in various institutions and events in Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Spain, Italy, and Finland, among others. Major collections, such as the Daros Latin American Collection in Zurich; the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, Argentina; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid; and the Museo del Barrio in New York, among others, contain his work.
From his first solo exhibitions, he developed a particular talent as a portraitist and observer of urban fauna, its scenery, and customs. His love for kitsch, his penchant for baroque excess, the stridency of his tropical palette, his gauche use of quotations, and his sarcastic flirtation with parody as a reading key shaped a universe capable of showing the vitality of the peripheral scenarios, as well as boldly documenting the chronic crisis in our creole geographies. The last supper in a Pampean register, Caravaggio from a Buenos Aires terrace, the use of autochthonous legends with a transnational aesthetic, turned Marcos López into a mythographer. That is why one of the central elements of his work is the capacity, nestled in his photographs, to generate stories. Each one is revealed as the lost frame of a film that, lacking the complete negative, the viewer hastens to recover and reconstruct. It would seem that the duty to record is relegated in the artistic ethics of Marcos López, to give way to the passion to fabulate, to the high-flown and powerful exercise of reinventing the world.