30 May 2013

The Intimate Subversion by Ángel Marcos
in the Collateral Events - Biennale di Venezia

The Intimate Subversion is an exhibition project designed by the Spanish artist Ángel Marcos (Medina del Campo, 1955) expressly for the spaces in the Scuola di San Pasquale in Campo San Francesco della Vigna. The exhibition, which will run from 31 May to 30 September (press preview on 28 and 29 May, official opening at 5.30 pm on 30 May), offers insights into the recent research by this artist, who, through installations, photographs, videos and objects, explores some of the urban, civic and social realities that are characteristic of our times.

Co-ordinated by the Castile and León Ministry of Culture through the MUSAC (Castile and León Museum of Contemporary Art), the project is curated by Luca Massimo Barbero and is one of the official Collateral Events at the 55th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia.

The Intimate Subversion is the culmination of a process of creative inquiry which, in the late 1990s, took Ángel Marcos on a journey to photograph communities, urban centres, neighbourhoods and other places in critical circumstances, all of them characterised by close social relations and by a kind of 'normal atypicality' far removed from any exoticism or whiff of controversy. He has always been interested in social environments and today turns his attention to Las Tudas and La Mota in Medina del Campo in the autonomous community of Castile and León. During the period after the Spanish Civil War, these two neighbourhoods acquired the permanent features of urban areas populated exclusively by the working class. Ángel Marcos seeks to reveal the existence in these communities of a social network that most people are largely unaware of, a network constructed as a result of constant exchanges marked by a powerful sense of ritual, which is also visually present. By photographing these residential places in such a neutral and personal manner, Ángel Marcos reconstructs and shows us the dense web of exchanges between the private sphere and the surrounding environment. In a political poetics of photography, these exchanges take place, according to the artist, like bolts of energy that are difficult to destroy. Through the images in the exhibition, Marcos transports us back to a private world characterised by unknown ties which bear no connection to capitalism and in which he highlights the strength of the relations generated by motivations that are in contrast with the prevailing economic and financial dynamic. The domestic intimacy of these homes is the heart of the artist's reflection on resistance to the essence of the market today and is the origin of The Intimate Subversion.

The centrepiece of this exhibition project is Non Olet (It Does Not Smell), a sculptural work consisting of illuminated letters that make up the famous Latin expression. According to Marcos, this phrase uttered by Vespasian in reply to his son Titus, who had asked him if he was not embarrassed to receive revenue from the public latrines, underpins his entire project for Venice. In the artist's view, Vespasian's reply is less fundamental than the reason for it: the process of Western society's increasing distance from the organic matter and fluids by which it feels disgusted. The sense of the flesh is, therefore, the starting point for creating a new civil model based on intimate subversion, which the artist makes manifest in the part of the exhibition located on the ground floor, in a video and through the stimulation of the sense of touch and the handling of objects, in this case books available for visitors to consult. The second floor in the Scuola di San Pasquale also provides an outstanding setting for a >b>suspended labyrinth of more than a hundred photographic images printed on plastic, which provides visitors with the opportunity to enter the domestic environments travelled through by the artist, who has captured their most significant elements, from objects of worship to everyday items, as well as the popular music that is the source of the sounds to be heard.

The Intimate Subversion by Ángel Marcos occupies both floors of the Scuola di San Pasquale. Constructed in the 17th century and run at the outset by the Franciscan Friars Minor, the building was home to the Brotherhood of the Holy Stigmata. The school itself, founded for charitable purposes and to spread the message of Christ, stands next to the Church of San Francesco della Vigna, which was begun by Jacopo Sansovino and which has a façade designed by Andrea Palladio.

The Intimate Subversion is supported by the Castile and León Ministry of Culture through the MUSAC (Castile and León Museum of Contemporary Art) and by the Ernst Hilger Gallery in Vienna (Austria), the Trayecto Gallery in Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain), the Enlace Arte Contemporáneo Gallery in Lima (Peru), Adrian Riklin and Antonis Stachel from Vienna (Austria) and DKV Health Insurance.


ÁNGEL MARCOS (MEDINA DEL CAMPO, VALLADOLID [SPAIN], 1955)
The work of Ángel Marcos refers constantly to the concept of the 'blind spot' as formulated by the writer and Nobel prize-winner Elias Canetti: a blind spot of inversion beyond which things are no longer true. Marcos remarks that the impetus for his gaze lies in this beyond experience; there in that place that lies between desire and publicity, this being understood as the outcome of a replacement of reality brought about by seduction.