It is a remarkable image. There is much to say about it. In the picture (Documentary: there is no montage in this case) there is a sticky wall with cheap posters hanging on it: hamburgers for a few pesos, hot dogs in promo, a chicken on a spit -drawn, headless- moving its legs gracefully... that is what can be seen. That and the name of the place –Parrillón Delivery.com, a flower stand, and Marcos López´s art crowning all from above.
And it is above this scenario, like a Michelangelo fresco -a worn, oily, South American version of a fresco- there is a reproduction of Roast in Mendiolaza, perhaps the most famous work from Marcos Lopez. In this case, in this spontaneous and profane version, the author´s signature does not even appear: the barbecue owner appropriated the image and dared to intervene with his own tools: from the central character of the photo -the sculptor Juan Longhini- comes out a speech balloon in this case saying "...just a step away from the station!!!"
After seeing this, it is very difficult to find a language -another one- that best shows the scopes and meanings of the work from Marcos López: an artist that swings between the Queen Sofía and the Greater Buenos Aires barbecues spots, between pearl earrings and the hairy pig. Standing on the exact spot that separates -or unites- the brightness of the biennials and the infinite dust of the periphery, Marcos Lopez shows an un-transferable skill at mixing textures and making them part of a single universe of meaning, or at least of a single question: what makes up the Latin American identity? What are we made up of? That is -or appears to be- the eternal question that drives Marcos López and has ended up transforming him into what he is today: one of the most important authors of Latin American photography of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a chaotic exegete of American gene, and a man who has, for more than half his life, dedicated himself to only two things: reading frames of underdevelopment... and making a particular form of order and beauty from apparent single chaos.
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Marcos López was born in an inland village of the Santa Fe province, in the heart of a family marked by Catholic morality. What followed was as expected: his parents wanted him to get married, become an athlete, go to college, to be docile. And Marcos did what he could. He studied engineering and was in a relationship with a girlfriend that lasted ten years. Later he left everything -the career, the girlfriend- and went to Buenos Aires, a city, which in the post dictatorship, only had room for excess.
In Buenos Aires he met Liliana Maresca, a pivotal figure in contemporary Argentine art and –for Marcos- a delightful Virgilio in a city on the edge. In no time Marcos was submerged in, and fascinated by Maresca and her circumstances: at home –Maresca´s home that is- there were always a lot of people and the 80s met with its own mystic: there was sex, there were drugs and sometimes there was also rock. Hand in hand with that woman, Marcos -who became a sort of official photographer of that mad mansion- discovered all the worlds that fit in a world. And he also discovered which place he wanted to take within that endless map.
Since then, Marcos knew he did not want to do advertising photography. He did not want to do magazine covers. What he did not want, at least in the first instance, was to even make money. What Marcos wanted was for his pictures to be a form of art, which hang in museums and be sold as pictures. By then, he had started his first known series: portraits in black and white taken between 1982 and 1992, and published in 1993 in his book ´Retratos´. The dual universe can be seen that Marcos López was delving through -and continues marking- on one hand this excess of the '80s in Buenos Aires, and on the other, reserve and flowered wallpaper from Santa Fe.
One year after the publication of Retratos, Marcos took a final leap to color -which he transformed into a strong, ideological element-, he began integrating study groups and training along with other great prodigies of argentine photography -like Oscar Pintor, Eduardo Grossman, Eduardo Gil, Hellen Zout and Ataúlfo Perez Aznar- and won a scholarship to study film in Cuba: it was the San Antonio de los Baños School, which had been founded by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and which -like Liliana Maresca´s house- acted for him as a new Babel full of languages that Marcos was determined to unravel.
There, in Cuba, not only did he get to know the cultural diversity that fitted in Latin America, but also for the first time came across the question that would accompany him ever since: what texture was -and is- the Latin American continent made up of. And how could you relate that texture.
As a final work in his first year of school, Marcos raised his own hypothesis and made a video called eternal Gardel, where you can see a demonstration with banners of Carlos Gardel in front of the Karl Marx Theater. With this composition, Marcos was able to name a feeling that hitherto haunted him: Argentine culture -symbolized in Gardel- was part of a more variegated and complex genre, which is the Latin American identity (summarized in a strong name -Marx- from the Cuban political ideology).
Within fifteen minutes of this video, Latino Pop was born: an aesthetic that is now the hallmark of Marcos López, and which mixes the staging of scenes, the saturation of vibrant colors, the carnival code, the search for a balance in excess, and the use of people who are no longer individuals –in a documentary photography way- but stereotypes that embody ideas.
Using all these elements Marcos has managed to portray, probably like no other, the ambivalences and subtleties of a continent and country that swing eternally between excitement and savagery. That's why, although his work is not based on the tradition of documentary photography, his pictures themselves are documents, records of chaos.
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At Marcos Lopez´s house you can see and kick things like: balloons, birthday caps, sculptures of Peron, Evita and Jemanjá, an American Airlines plane, a lucky cat made in China, a navy blue painted wall, another papered with pink flowers, a red wooden rabbit, a cardboard mermaid, colors -primary, secondary: all- murals, heroes painted on a terrace, a dog. In Marcos Lopez´s Facebook you can see things like: a platinum Konex trophy interacting with a skull, with a picture of a house in Carlos Paz and a Paraguayan lace maker. Two teenagers, holding hands in a bath, dressed in Catholic school uniform and accompanied by a sketch completely naked. A León Ferrari crucifix mounted on a plane and surrounded by things that are not even worth going into. Etc.
And after seeing Marcos Lopez´s house and Facebook, one can reach the following conclusion: López -slight, lively, dangerous- has the playfulness of men that never grow up. "Everything is so intense to me that it always seems like a debut, as if I were a dancer stomping and swinging bolas at the same time, doing playback in a Las Vegas casino full of drunks who do not understand one damn bit why I dance like a drugged up doll and why I use ´gaucho´ sequined panties, patent leather boots, a wide-brimmed hat and pink silk shirt" said Marcos on Facebook a few days ago, playing with words like they were circus balls . Marcos tried to explain the name of this exhibition: DEBUT AND FAREWELL. And in that attempt he followed with this: "As the Pumas or the All Blacks, or the Leonas when they embrace each other to whisper a few words, make a secret pact, before the game starts, I also set myself a target. I just tell myself, "Come on Marcos feel like La Cautiva in which the husband has just been beheaded, feel like the green and pink transgender compere in the la Scola do Samba from Mangueira . Like the jasmine in the neighbor's yard, Juan Moreira stabbing his dagger into the military, Camilo in the Sierra Maestra. Feel like drunk Jackson Pollock throwing black paint as if he were frenzied at white fabric. Like Quemero. The beer and fag guys in the San Telmo bar. Like the man in the picture 'No bread without work'. Like the dancer in the Berni picture, or the dressmaker mother that looks at her".
He continued with this and then -as he always does- he left.
Marcos Lopez always talks and then leaves.
Always writes and leaves.
Always takes photos -o rather plastic actions- and then leaves.
As if he had committed a crime or an exorcism, or just a great, unprecedented disorder (or the contrary: as if he had ordered the parts so clearly that it lacerates), Marcos López flees -or so it seems- dying of health and shame.
“I am very fearful too. That is, I no longer drink beer Mondays at four o'clock in the morning with transvestites in Constitucion. If something interests me, I go by taxi and look out the window. And I do not drink alcohol any more, I do not take drugs, I have to take my children to school. There is something from that shy boy from the province that is still in me. That shy guy who leaves the bathroom with a towel so that his wife cannot see him naked. I am that guy too” he said a while ago, during a meeting in his house.
That day it was possible to understand an essential element in Marcos López: the permanent game between excess and modesty; the childish ways, the provincial man, the man who dares to do everything and then -when he sees the result- gets scared and runs away, or stares at cameras and says, "What do you expect from me?".
The question is what we expect at this point from Marcos Lopez…especially since there is more than one possible answer. In the Queen Sofia, for example, they want an author and want Latino Pop. But in the barbecue in Flores they do not want an author: they want their meat. From that point on, an artist satisfying both desires is a miracle of intelligence. Or the saints –many- of which Marcos Lopez has in his home.