Rodolfo Marqués

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1982

            Rodolfo Marqués' artistic production covers a wide range of topics, always guided by the purpose of investigating the nature and dynamics of certain social and cultural phenomena. Thus, the emergence of the gamer culture, the dystopian forms of occupying and constructing space, sound devices, and the printed culture of the past and present make up several themes that converge, mix, and feed each other to produce that peculiar machine of deviant meanings that is the artist's work. Whether through paintings, sculptures, installations, or publications, the artist developed an aesthetic personality committed to "hacking," putting in a trance and interrupting the tendencies of contemporary common sense. 

            Trained at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes, in Argentina, and selected for numerous local and international residencies and awards, Marques turned his production into a collection of singular artifacts and pamphlets. Dominated by an ethic of invention, the artist has carried out a series of exhibitions in which the room seems to reproduce the environment of the workshop-laboratory – a space crowded with devices whose functioning is absolutely mysterious, surrounded by paintings and projection drawings on supports such as cardboard, plywood panels, gypsum boards, galvanized metal supports, and marquetry. They seem to postulate scenes that come from an imagination tinged by the impact of technology and industry, put at the service of thinking strange universes.  

            In parallel, he has also worked as a writer and pamphleteer. He has notably written and edited texts that review issues of contemporary aesthetic and political theory and also intervened in spaces and episodes of Argentine history. This interest in editorial practices is evident in the formation of the N.B.A. (Nueva Bibliofilia Argentina [New Argentine Bibliophilia]), of which he is a founding member. His work, in short, resembles that of the Renaissance utopians, who, through a mixture of skills and interests, conjectured a world in which it is possible to probe and project alternative ways of life and in which we can only see again the collapse of contemporary modes of existence.