Iván Marino

The monographic exhibition of the Barcelona-based Argentine artist Iván Marino consists of six computerised audiovisual installations of the series Los desastres, created with the support of MEIAC in 2006 and 2007, as well as a selection of his most outstanding video works produced over the past fifteen years.

The works invite viewers to probe the meanders of human realities and, more specifically, the uncanny and often astonishing relation between people and violence. Through the concept of reality a nexus is established between his recent installations and video productions. In the production of the installations, Goya's series of engravings Los desastres de la Guerra (1810-1820) was an important source of inspiration, a work the painter based on specific events in order to analyse the human condition itself.

In the computerised audiovisual installations titled Sangue (2006, Lingua (2006), El garrote (2007) and Horca (2007), Iván Marino also drew on pictures of real events from either official state (television) or non-official (clandestine network, internet) media broadcasts of scenes of bombings, torture and hanging. These video fragments were added to the database articulating the works' computerised generative systems. Marino makes use of Goya's strategy of isolating an event, transforming it into a striking image that presents certain incidents, yet, as opposed to Goya, the representation never takes on any aesthetically explicit form.

The works from the series Los desastres are produced through a generative system programmed in a dynamic manner to alter the order in which the sequences of the images are presented so that the order of the audiovisual sequences is not linear, but always viewed differently depending on the random procedure implemented by the artist.

In his first experimental documentaries and video pieces, the artist, behind the camera, situated himself as an observer of the reality of the places or the people he explored. In the videos Un día Bravo (1987-1999), Siesta (1997) and Cinco retratos de una mujer sentada (2007) the narration conveys a certain will to neutrality, a distancing with respect to the subject observed. However, in his more recent installation works one can surmise a decisive transition in his conceptual approach. Before the reality in question was restricted to individual or private poetics and lives, whereas now he focuses on the big global human issues.

Ivan Marino
Kurator: Claudia Giannetti