In the text “La Argentina Pop” , Marcos López describes how he stopped working in black and white to get away from the air of tragedy and melancholy which had breathed through his portraits and documentary work prior to 1993.
The move to the saturated flashes and delirious iconography which has characterised his photographic work over the last ten years could be viewed by some as frivolous eccentricity. Even the title under which most of these images have been grouped – “Pop Latino” – has led some people to imagine the unprejudiced optimism of “art in the era of triumphant capitalism”. But it doesn’t take much to scrape away this glaring, grotesque surface layer presented in these images – summed up by the artist as “sub-realist” – and expose the bitterness and clearly insistent subversion that lies beneath. Although it might not be apparent in the work, as López himself recognises in his “Manifiesto de Caracas”, there are invisible traces of the Argentine dictatorship, as well as references to the years of political fiction and socio-economic sham which led to the rise in Latin America of operatic figures like Perón, Menem or Fidel Castro.
In this sense, Marcos López sees his discipline as a clear political and aesthetic heir to the Mexican muralists as well as to kitsch, the comic, and global advertising style . As he himself has admitted, resorting to the joke, the use of masks and gaudy “colorinche” is in fact a deliberate way of distancing his work from the pain of the situation, “in order to avoid feeling the intensity of direct contact (…)”, although in the end he recognises that, “the country and the memories are painful (…)”.
His photographs are, then, a subversive and demystifying exercise which challenge the complacent viewer. Far from experiencing a chromatic, media-fuelled orgy of images, we feel a deep sense of unease. From my point of view, the result is much more disturbing than the clichéd images of poverty and identity offered to us by most pauperist photography coming out of Latin America.
Latin American photography has often approached the collective lives of the population though a mixture of ethnographic objectivity and enraptured fascination for the world of the poor and for aspects of reality which verge on the magical or ritualistic. Basically here I am thinking about the work of Don Manuel Álvarez Bravo and all the photographs which – to varying degrees of success - have followed in his wake, practising an austere black and white photography which presents a vision of Latin American identity which is somewhat idealised or otherwise clichéd and condescending.
The work of Marcos López tears this tradition apart in two senses: from a purely formal way, whereby the poetic, melancholic chiaroscuro has been substituted by a bacchanal of saturated, discordant colour which challenges every rule; the classical reposed compositions replaced by dynamic associations between characters and objects derived from the world of advertising which amplify and often distort the iconic messages of each photograph.
Secondly, from a thematic and conceptual point of view, his photographs reveal themselves to be a powerful device for reflecting on Latin American identity through the deconstructive accumulation of its most famous myths and clichés. In other words, the photographs deal with the difficulty of focussing on Argentine identity – and by extension with Latin American identity – as something authentic, uncontaminated by American consumerism’s globalised vision and the disproportionate desire for appearance.
In this way, Marcos López takes us to an aesthetic territory which we initially want to reject because of the definitions of “good taste” which have been instilled into us, practically from infancy, but which at the same time irremissibly attract us. Taken to their most kitsch extreme, his photographs are strengthened in this slippery space. It isn’t always such an easy space to enter, or pin down by valued judgements or measurements of good taste, since in all the images, the background and form compete with each other and the references are continually mined by the scene that is created.
In López’ work everything ends with a festive, multicolour outpouring whose tragedy is proportionate to the chromatic intensity with which they are displayed. Each photograph creates a personal world where glamour or kitsch, embellished here and there by all sorts of dreams and parodies, fails to hide their sinister nature, their “dark side”. It is a darkness which embodies melancholy and nihilism equally, because the artist is aware that reality more often than not completely overwhelms fiction, as the lives of the “myths” of recent Argentine history like Evita, Menem or Maradona have demonstrated all too well.
As such, each photograph represents an explosive injection, as Pedro Almodóvar would say, into a world of third hand glamour: “from stereotype to stereotype, like a path to the very essence of the problem (…)”, according to Marcos López himself. It comes of no surprise, then, that among his later work, he has dared to deliver a kind of parody-homage to the famous photographic image, “La Buena Fama Durmiendo” (Good reputation sleeping) taken in 1939 by Manuel Alvarez Bravo , transforming the dream-like image into a gay icon which rarely fails to disturb those who revere the mythical status of the original.
But the greatest paradox in all this is that Marco López has essentially never ceased to respect the same vision as Alvarez Bravo; his version is also a “bewitched and phantasmagoric” vision of the Latin American reality, the only difference being that before this reality López has placed a distorting mirror which accentuates, and even “monstrosifies”, its principal defects.
Referring to this specifically, the artist has indicated: “I never bothered about finding out what magic realism was. Perhaps it’s this: when everyone involved in a situation is aware of taking part in an absurd act but does not deign to betray it, or show it up for what it is. Like a game for big people (…).”
Every image that Marcos López “constructs” constitutes in their entirety more than a second order reality relating to Baudrillard’s postmodern theories on simulacrum. They are a masquerade, whose underlying bitterness reminds me of the carnival-like conspiracies of the Spanish painter Antonio Gutiérrez Solana, another artist whose work, like López’, straddles the thin line separating social reality from grotesque fiction.
A synthesis of all this could be seen in two excellent photographs taken during two different periods over the last ten years. The first is a snapshot from 1996 entitled “Fiesta patria, Ticara Jujuy”. Curiously it is not a constructed image but one that is “paradoxically documentary”, representing a commemorative march headed by some poor-looking children pathetically dressed up before a gigantic Argentine flag. The image is so sad and melancholic that it puts into question whether the scene is a celebration or really a funeral… Viewing this photograph closely, we come to understand what Marcos López means when he substitutes glamorous North American “pop” with the disenchanted “plop” of Latin America or, equally, why he should wish to replace “the deep terracotta of the American highplains” with “Tahitan red, Calypso green and scarlet pink (…)”
The other image is one of his latest creations. It was taken in 2002 and is entitled “Asado Creole” (Creole Roast). Around a rectangular table are seated twelve figures whose aesthetic and geometric arrangement resembles that of Jesus Christ and his Apostles in the emblematic painting by Leonardo da Vinci. The “apostle-artists” are digging into the remains of a roast whose scraps are spread across the table… Far from being a simple parody-homage to the Italian artist’s famous fresco, this intertextual reference is also an irreverent deconstruction of Christian iconography, which – consciously or unconsciously – echoes the iconographic and aesthetic universe of Buñuel’s beggar’s banquet for Viridiana . A second reading, which overrides all anecdotal elements, is in the light of the harsh economic crisis that Argentina was already experiencing when the photograph was taken – with unfamiliar periods of hunger amongst the normal population trapped within the “playpen” – and in the sense that this crisis could affect the already precarious world of the artist.