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Alberto Rodríguez Collía, Jorge de León

ARCO Madrid 2017

Booth 90P06
Madrid, Spain

For ARCO 2017, Proyectos Ultravioleta showcases two bodies of work by two artists that share the same starting point: images from Guatemala’s pulp press and the internet. 



For the past 10 years, Jorge de León (Guatemala, 1976) has collected images that show a landscape marked by makeshift solutions, violence, chaos, and impending disaster, which he recently started to translate into small scale acrylics on canvas. Despite the salacious representation of these regular occurrences, de León finds moments of humor and optimism, to inform a complex representation of quotidian life in Guatemala City.

Alberto Rodriguez Collía (Guatemala, 1985) goes even further: he translates these photographs into single colored woodcuts, on top of which he prints (with the same color ink) iconographic works of contemporary art of the last 60 years. By simple juxtaposition, these images begin to abstract themselves and, as such, manage to talk about the ambiguities that often surround the art world, and which utilize art and artists to hide a series of ulterior motives: whether economic, social, political, or a combination, in order to wash the image of a person, a company, a country, or even to launder great amounts of money and influence. 



The result is a strong two artist presentation that forces spectators to confront a reality that many have grown accustomed to seeing, and others refuse to notice or simply acknowledge that it exists.