For decades, Marcos López has pursued popular icons—the Che, Borges, Gardel, San Martín, Criollitas, the Argentine flag, wine penguins, blood sausage, First Communion photographs—attentive to those figures, objects, and familiar scenes that seem to condense a collective spirit, an identity. To say something profound. To point toward some kind of truth.
Yet these icons, so closely identified with what they represent, do not in fact resemble what they are meant to embody. Truth never appears; all that remains are the flat, glossy surfaces of images. Perhaps this is why Marcos López's photographs emanate a subtle melancholy. They may be visually excessive, yet within that excess one senses an absence—something missing, something lost—that López's photographs continue to pursue. This is why the López method is one of accumulation.
In relentlessly pursuing the iconic, his photographs themselves became icons—"That's a Marcos López." At that point, the photographer shifted his gaze, transforming his photographic practice. He began intervening in the photographs of others: popular reproductions of works by masters such as Ansel Adams, alongside original studio portraits by anonymous photographers, acquired like trinkets at flea markets. He became a painter.
He paints what cannot be seen, what the camera could never capture: the hidden, uncanny underside of the flat surface. He paints desires, fears, fantasies. He restores to images what they have lost. It is here that López resolves the melancholy that had long inhabited his photographs.
Natalia Brizuela, May 2025
Natalia Brizuela, May 2025
