With his retrospective at the Larriviere Foundation Marcos Lopez reaffirms its place as a producer of images that manages to establish itself simultaneously at the center of contemporary art and on the fringes of visual culture. There is hardly a more iconic work from the first 25 years of the 21st century than his Fry in mendiolaza (2001), the digitally composed photograph of almost mural proportions, taken during a royal barbecue in Córdoba, where the twelve apostles were artist friends of the photographer and Christ, a meal prepared for the final dinner, planned as a barbecue in the rays of the mountain sun.
What confirms its iconographic status is less the direct reference to an atavistic image than it is Leonardo’s last supper (1494-1498), but the appropriations of López’s appropriation, whose scene (for that is what it produces) is anything but iconoclastic and irreverent, examines a possible genealogy of eating as ritual. Far from León Ferrari’s eschatology, which was considered heretical, López’s scene posits Da Vinci’s as a choreographic arrangement that we repeat without thinking.
In doing so, Marcos López achieved what few (if any) contemporary Argentine artists could or could do: an image that transcends its source to establish itself as something of its own and to be reused outside the art system as a symbol of an Argentine ritual situation. (he had called it Creole subrealism) without any reference to its distant Renaissance origins. Fry in mendiolaza can now be considered a meme (a physical meme based on the French Francois Jost’s category in the essay). Say it with memes) When It appears in Parrillón, a delivery grill near the Liniers station (“the torment of artificial wine and its barbecue atmosphere,” come the echoes of “Giltrabajo” by Hermética). In a formal operation of memes, an advertising comic balloon is inserted into Mendiolaza’s Christ (“…a small step from the station”), but outside of the parodic gesture that the digital meme adopts La Gioconda afterwards Duchamp.
The image of López (who compiled these variant uses of his image) also appears in Chimichurri, a Steak & Grill of Houston, reproducing his image as decorative art. The apostles of ribs and red wine framed by the solemnity of fine arts and a neon (divine light?) that reinterprets the classic font: “The last roast“.
Finally, the most concrete appropriation of memes came from the art world itself, when at the 8th Biennale of Documentary Photography in Tucumán, Ivana Fernández presented another version of the Roast of (San) Marcos, in which the apostles were replaced by women who are also part of the Santa Fe artist’s body of work (many of which are also in Larriviere). There was also a sentence: “I’m sorry, Marcos, but something happened.” Of course, the feminist green tide, of which Ivana Fernández posits that the last dining table turned into a grill was taken over by the López girls (who are by no means hegemonic role models). Here, too, the scene staged for the photo ignores its classic origins: it is not about questioning religion, but about the fact that grilling is a man’s thing. Should Marcos do a queer remix himself? Mendiolaza? No, it’s better to let the image have its own way and adopt it here, there and everywhere.
*******
Continuing the remixes, what’s left of the Rolling Stones this week presented a 2025 version of “(I can’t get no) Satisfaction” all in one Joint venture with DJ producer Fat Boy Slim on the EP Satistaction prostituteswhere sixty years later one of the hit(s) of the 60s counterculture is mixed with the dance hit “The Rockafeller Prostitute” (1998). Neither song is improved and the result is retro at worst. It leads to the unbearable megamixes of the 80s, in which no one saw the DJ as an artist and there were producers who, for example, packaged the Beatles’ hits in one tempo dance floor wedding reception.
Closer to playing “Twist and Shout.” Show match as remixes with the right to subgenre (a disassembly and assembly process in which the original is subjected to cosmetic surgery). Anyway, there’s something: the EP suggests that the indelible riff of “Satisfaction” is already a sound meme, on the same level as the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, symbolizing tension. In this case, the sounds of utopia and the resulting disillusionment of the sixties are distorted.
*****
I’ll meet again in Larriviere Mario. A small black and white photo that López presented as a journalistic photo of a competition, but in which his entire theatrical apparatus was already used. Mario It captures my entire attention and every detail of the picture takes me back to my 12 year old self. Not one more and not one less. It is the effect of roasted Mendiolaza, but on an intimate scale. I don’t think what happened to me with this photo of Marcos López will happen to (almost) everyone.
Mario, the model in the photo, is at Che Burguer, the first fast food in Buenos Aires on Florida Street, and I don’t think there is any other record of this place other than this photo. Mario, whom young López took to this location just for the photo, poses with a box of hamburgers and fries; He wears Lennon glasses and bears signs of the stone subculture, heritage of Buenos Aires, from Belgrano to Palomar. The usual Little Stone gardener, a pin on his tongue, the Indian silk scarf around his neck. Pure unnoticed social history. The only thing missing here is the patchouli discharge, which was intended to mask fumes that weren’t those of the roasting.
About The Author
