Los bienaventurados

While in his previous work, “Paisajes” (landscapes), Ángel Marcos was reflecting on desolation, and did so introducing a significant autobiographical content into his creations, in this new proposal, “Los bienaventurados” (the blessed), he is now considering exclusion. And once again, he has decided to pass the images of the world through an autobiographical filter. For him, the incidents of modern life weigh on the excluded, as reflected both in an urban context (so widely used in current-day art) and in a fictional space constructed on the basis of a biographical experience. This return to spaces charged with life as opposed to the cold, anonymous scenes of the communications media city is symptomatic of his artistic position. This series. “Los bienaventurados”, consists of twelve pieces in different formats, but with a clear predominance of large sizes. He mixes and uses indiscriminately the direct shot and the image constructed by means of digital manipulation. This dual technical nature of the images represents for Ángel Marcos the attempt “to make a creative use of the interaction of different orders of images” (Kevin Robins). For Ángel Marcos, a priority interest continues to be the cultural and political setting of the images, that is to say their location and significance in a context of global information such as exists at present. This aspect seems to me to be especially important when approaching his work, as it reflects his attitude to the images, and explains the selection of the medium of photography to carry forward his creation. Above all, he is interested in how the images bring us meanings and continue “mediating between the interior and exterior realities” (Kevin Robins). It could be said that these pieces are constructed attending to two aspects: on the one hand, the elaboration of an autonomous, constructed image, favoring its identification as object-image, with all its plasticity , its internal laws of composition, or in other words the recognition of the power of affection. Of the photographic image, its capacity to provoke an experience of reality not depending exclusively on recognition of the external world. Ángel Marcos produces images that function as “aesthetic moments” with a capacity to provoke a transformation in the subject, based on a recognition of realities situated within us rather than in the external world (Sarah Kember). So it is that these pieces reveal their character as constructed images – the angle of the union of images of different origins, publicity illumination, scenographic elaboration, and so on – thus contributing to the establishement of an incomplete relation of an incomplete relationship with reality; this break obliges the spectator to maintain a relationship with the work that is far-removed from the identification usual in the medium of photography. Alberto Martín. “Reflections in a neon puddle” .