Ángeles Marco is the protagonist of the third exhibition of Every Landscape is Fiction
03.05.2017
The installation, of variable dimensions, is composed of 14 iron tripods, six of which have safety belts suspended from them, covered with graphite powder; three have rubber cones attached by metal bars, and four are arranged empty. This is one of the most hermetic works and of greatest constructive rigor by the Valencian artist in which an underlying narrative background subsists. I seek, she explains, "to provoke sensations of instability, so that each object created does not die with its representation. Nothing is static, not even we ourselves. I am interested in that having a projection in sculpture; that is why the sensations I wish to provoke are not so much sculptural as human". Tripods, safety belts and bottomless wells resemble a forest, a landscape flooded with thick and dark fog in which it is impossible to walk. An invisible and unfathomable reality. And in the forest, a series of bottomless wells where the soul resides in a deep abyss of dark and black water. An example of conceptual landscape, with no intention whatsoever of creating beauty, in the wake of minimalism, a sculpture far from the academic: from a cold metal tripod, hangs a black rubber cone tilted. The opaque black and the cold metallic gleams and bright contrasts that geometric rigidity with a less strict geometry, that of the cone-shaped form with a more manual appearance. One must lean in to see the bottom. And not be frightened. More information in the complete note.
As the third exhibition in the series "Every Landscape is Fiction," the work of Ángeles Marco is presented, one of the main figures responsible for the renewal of the Spanish sculpture landscape since the 1980s. She belonged to that generation that transformed sculptural art and was called the New Spanish Sculpture alongside artists such as Juan Muñoz, Jaume Plensa, Susana Solano, Eva Lootz, Miquel Navarro, Cristina Iglesias, Txomin Badiola, Pello Irazu, Sergi Aguilar, etc.Minimalism, constructivism, and conceptual art are some of the influences that can be traced in her installations and sculptures, grouped in series that address different metaphors and to which the artist returns again and again. She employs iron preferentially and occasionally other materials such as rubber, wax, or glass. Feelings of solitude and anguish give life to her pieces and installations, endowed with a particular narrative sense.The series "Leap into the Void" and "The Transit" is one of the most representative of the Valencian artist and defines her experimental character. The artist adopts treatments and resources from different techniques, directly transferred from the world of industrial engineering to sculptural practice. She mastered the craft technically in order to dedicate herself to artistic research. "Leap into the Void" is the stance that Ángeles Marco adopts in the face of reality. Her anguish is literally a sensation of infinite freedom in space. Her "leaps into the void" are a consequence of that vertigo of freedom. Anguish is the continued presence of nothingness: the cold sweat of standing at the edge of a window, the joyous terror of the fall."The Transit" is the second recurring theme of the artist. The passage from one place to another, from one stage to another. They are images of corridors, bridges, stairs, passages, alleys… But also the transit from one chemical state to another or, even, the camouflage that seeks to make a presence invisible. Transition as a shiver, a movement from darkness to darkness.
