Marcos Lopez in LA presenting "Riotous". Curator: Jonathan Feldman -Getty Research Institute- / MakeArtNotWar.org/media

Riotous presents a series of works by Argentine artist Marcos López, produced since the end of the eighties on. López’s work is riotous in more than one dimension: it’s disruptive in his use of photography, closer to performance art or theater than to a registry, a document. His urban landscapes, for example, are perfect mise-en-scènes, where precarity and the popular become landscape, as in the close-ups at local bars or, more recently, in the Plaza de Mayo turned into the background of a cleansing ritual, stressing the human flag with a mask and the Pyramid of Mayo, symbol of the Revolution. López creates his own worlds not only by framing a portion of it, or applying a technique: in his works, images, histories, experiences, are deconstructed and rebuilt. Color is added or suppressed, sizes are perspectives become part of a game, the disciplinary is taken to a limit. Genres and beauty are in tension. The multiple world champion boxer, Carlos Monzón, in colors, measures up to a female counterpart and to a group, portrayed in black and white at the same gym in Santa Fé where the champion used to train.

By capturing Latin pop culture, especially in Argentina, and turn it into artistic thought, López plays with History, with memory, with culture. He turns it around, stretches and compresses it, stages it, revisits, and modifies it. Paradigmatic works like “Worried Gardel” and “Drinking wine in the terrace”, from the series Pop Latino, unfold a game of renovated references. There, the most famous tanguero of all times is captured in a moment of doubt, then of relaxation and exercising his profession. The local, the proximity, becomes part of the scene: the waiter, the soccer jersey. On the other hand, “The Captive”, from the series Subrealismo Criollo, the woman victim of the savage raid, inexorably destined to vexation and death as a symbol of the national “civilizing” process in European key, rebels, and defends herself. The blood on her blade finds continuity with the images confronting and surrounding her: “The Martyr”, a painting with an image repeated in photographs, suffers in silence the blade that pierces his heart, an analogy for Latin American cultural processes. The wallpaper that contains his suffering within the wall is a double wink to lower the tension, as it offers humor and, at the same time, brings about one of the artist’s earliest memories: his father’s hobby for changing the wallpapers in his house, at least, once a year. López intervenes catalogues with paradigmatic images from other artists, plays with the History of Art.

His proximity-obsession with David Hockney resides in the insistent use of primary colors. But López’s pop is “third-worldly”, it has the power of the tension between a Hollywood way of making and a constitutive precarity. The artist frees himself from the weight of Art. He brings the cultures of hybrid, contradictory peoples. In his work, vanguard and tango, perspective, and slums, coexist. The artist’s production is noisy, at times it gets out of control. Photography that looks like scenography melts with painting, installation, and video, or gets reversioned in other media. His transdisciplinary practice is, then, the result of the need to experiment as much as an inevitable effect of his aesthetic searches. There isn’t a unique way or making or style. Nor a fixed theme that determines the course of his becoming. Concerns and gazes are changing in López.

Marcos López lived many lives, creating a varied and heterogeneous spectrum of works. After appropriating and recreating a part of Art History’s most iconic images, and of bringing Argentine and Latin American popular culture to the art galleries through different media and disciplines, and through an infinite capacity of experimentation and creativity, López’s riotous nature continues to morph and mutate, projecting an unexpected road that will lead to mysterious and unknown horizons.

Marcos López / Artist @arcosLopezVirtual

Jonathan Feldman - Curator at Getty Research Institute / @JonathanFeldman.83

Pablo Bogdan - Gallerist @ Pablo Bogdan Art Gallery / www.pablobogdan.com / @ArtCounsellor

Daniela Aita aka Dakyta / Actress & Host  @Dakyta 

Sergio Bonacci Lapalma aka Chapete / Filmmaker @ChapeteVJ

Song on video, "Fanky" by Juan Moss, Sawtelle feat​. ​Quintana Musik. Album, Charly's Angels [Tributo a Charly Garc​í​a] by Make Noise Not War Records (Los Angeles, CA).

https://makenoisenotwar.bandcamp.com/album/charlys-angels-tributo-a-charly-garc-a

Recorded in Los Angeles, CA. 2023.

MAKE ART NOT WAR MEDIA is a multi-platform project in Los Angeles, CA managed by 501c3 Non-Profit for the Arts, MakeArtNotWar.org. The Mission is to host diverse voices, formats, and pursuits by showcasing local and international artists. Makeartnotwar.org/media #MakeArtNotWar