What I personally like most is going to the Salvation Army.
The one in Nueva Pomeya, in Saenz Avenue, which is a beautiful, wide, cobbled avenue. I do not know if it's because of the enthusiasm I have when I go - generally Saturday mornings, when there is little traffic, and from my house in Barracas you can reach it in fifteen minutes - but Nueva Pompeya is, for me, one of the most beautiful places in Buenos Aires; the space, the little houses, the neighborhood feel.
I also like –love– to go to Cotolengo Don Orione, which is in Cachi Street. Say around the corner. Roughly ten blocks away.
When I go, I pass by the two places. It makes me feel a similar excitement to that when seeing an art show I like, or a movie, which is worth pointing out that I see very few of.
Looking back within the arena of visual arts, the great David Hockney exhibition I saw last year at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and the movie POST TENEBRAS LUX from Charles Reigadas I saw in the Mar del Plata Festival will stay in my soul and in my heart.
After seeing the Mexican´s movie, I left the cinema speechless. I could not believe it. I was so impressed that I did not want to see any more movies (except mine about Ramon Ayala, which I was forced to watch because I have to finish making color corrections, although if it was up to me, I would tell the video operator technician "Fix the color as you see fit, using common sense").
The Hockney exhibition blew my brain. He is my favorite artist, more so than Berni. I think after seeing that exhibition and his videos I started painting with more enthusiasm. I would say with an emotional overflow, especially when I painted on collages of museum posters, full size. I would go to bed at half past ten, after dinner with the kids and watch some TV with my wife, as a normal family father, so to speak. I would wake up at four in the morning and would go to paint in the room like an unstoppable lone wolf on speed…on the floor…often painting in underpants.
Then I would return to bed at six, and wake up at half past seven, when my children would go to school as if nothing had happened.
The secret is learning to accept dualities. Bipolarities: I can make a clay doll with my daughter following the instructions from the ART ATTACK program with absolute tenderness, pleasure, and thanking heaven and the Virgin of Guadalupe for that moment, and then take a picture of a butcher wrapped up in black pudding as if it were a scarf, with a 40-centimeter knife in his hand. In the Salvation Army I feel something similar: the constant buzz of being in a creative act, a living thing ... looking at the objects, people´s actions: a woman sitting on the floor trying on flip flops, a parent buying an old toy for his child, the dynamics that employees have bringing furniture back and fro, mattresses, computers, and stacking them according to some criteria ... Lately I have gone many times to buy leather shoes, to hang from a wire , and oil paintings, landscapes. To make a work in relation to painting, pop art , and Nicolino Locche from Martha Pelufo , who since I saw him several years ago , cannot get out of my head.
I also bought the ´Ekeko´ God offerings there, porcelain doggies, costumes...
I think that this buying and selecting objects is essential as it gives you a so called creative moment.
After buying, I go back to my house so glad that I spend the time talking to the driver of the freight taxi - nonstop. There's something strange about second hand smells. Honestly, I do not like them very much. I get pleasure from the visual, tactile aspects, people´s obsession with buying... but not particularly the smell. I much prefer the smell in EASY in Barracas. Another place, which for me, is a temple of creation. I can stay half an hour choosing tapes, cables, nails, wood, watering cans...
Rather than being inspiring, EASY is where I talk to the inner elves that guide me in the creation of images. Actually, what I do is to wait for the goblins to fall, for the images to come, without anyone talking to me or asking me anything. Moreover, in the summer it is cool.
I look at the colors of the new plastic, fluorescent orange hoses, wood veneers, and try to put myself in the exact balance between EASY, dirt, poverty, those landfills that are in Constitution, Barracks and San Telmo, and the aesthetic glamour of the Salvation Army and Cotolengo Don Orione. I seek the subtlety. Just as my yoga teacher once said to me: "Try to stay in the moment there is between one thought and another".
Something similar to what -to me- is said in Buddhism: to find happiness we must move, feel, accept and realize that we are but nothing.
Marcos López
