The journey to the utopian world of Ángel Marcos

Ángel Marcos fills the Domus Artium 2002 in Salamanca with Topologías introspectivas, the great retrospective of the photographer from Valladolid, curated by Fernando Castro Flórez. Through his camera, he has created a story and a portrait of key themes in recent decades and this great exhibition is a tour and review of some of the artist's most important series.

The viewer will begin a journey through different corners of the world, from the most important metropolises, in a kind of journey and path that the artist proposes around a dream, but it will also be a journey through critical consciousness, to contemplate what is happening in society. The works are exercises in resistance, of leaving the current mode, the automatic pilot and thinking from images. From the aesthetics he seeks, we move on to the poetic element, but always in parallel with the critical, but also contemporary, nuance.

Topologías introspectivas al Domus Artium 2002.

The DA2 of Salamanca, therefore, will be filled with reality, with dream poetry, with stopping in New York, but also taking a break in Havana or China with Around a Dream of the year 2017, without forgetting Las Vegas, in addition to Barcelona or Madrid, of totally different places and scenarios that have nothing to do; however, they end up creating common paths. The artist talks about returning to nature, of traces and landscapes around the concept of the dream, without forgetting issues such as seeing the city as a neuralgic point of power, economic and religious. Three rooms in the center where he shows a whole meditation on the existential condition of big cities, but at the same time, taking the poetic and existential binomial, he proposes an aesthetic-anthropological meditation on contemporary living conditions and goes beyond a critical poetics that does not become pamphleteering.

Topologías introspectivas al Domus Artium 2002.

Aspects such as exclusion, marginalization, utopian desire, hopelessness, drama, are elements that he creates to compose this portrait of the era. In the series about New York, the city of skyscrapers that gave rise to the group of the Irascibles (Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko), Ángel Marcos radicalizes the imagination of the entire peripheral concept and gives rise to a vision of the city as an eschatological urban silhouette. It is not a documentary work and it is not the intention of Topologías introspectives, but it is a critical exhibition and it does so by presenting it as a kind of dismantling of the present and a line of systematicity in the artist's career. These topologies have part of the logic of the places visited and the footprint of human presence. Ángel Marcos creates narrative works, of spaces and their architectures, of longings, but also of fears, hardships and precariousness. “There is a need to aspire to a better life,” explains Fernando Castro with the work of Ángel Marcos.

The artist from Valladolid is part of the history of Spanish photography and is a reference artist, but the DA2 in Salamanca gives depth, creates a conceptual discourse and grants Marcos the place he deserves in a society that has already lived twenty-five years of the new millennium. It is necessary to stop at each work, in each place, in all the details of his photographs and begin a journey through Marcos' fragile and utopian poetics.

Alrededor del sueño. China 19, Ángel Marcos (2007)