Since the beginning of his artistic career in the 80s, Rogelio López Cuenca (Nerja, 1959) worked by crossing visual arts and mass media. He exercised his own visual poetry that operates within the tradition of institutional criticism and the offshoots of Pop through multiple mediums such as painting, installation, urban interventions and publishing.
Start by exploring the music and especially collaborating with the group Peña Wagneriana and the collective Agustín Parejo School and UHP (United Brothers of Proletariat). His first forays mark certain concerns that he himself faced, such as urban space, popular language and that of avant-garde movements.
Only in 1992, in the context of the V Centenary of the Discovery of America, the Universal Exhibition in Seville, Madrid as the Cultural Capital of Europe and the Barcelona Olympics, a breakthrough took place in his work. Subsequently, he begins several critical interventions in the contemporary system, interventions that reflect the issues that move through his work – migration policies and historical memory or new forms of urban speculation and the sensationalism of culture, symptomatic of an expanding capitalism.
López Cuenca takes images and texts from different high and low culture media, often inserting them in advertisements or commercial devices in the public space to condemn situations of violence and discrimination that function simultaneously in historical and current terms. Also interesting is the ability to inscribe his works outside the museum environments, thus causing short-circuits in the various systems of social circulation of images, questioning the uniqueness of the artistic work and its place in conventional contemplation.
In this exhibition, the artist's first retrospective, his main concerns are examined through five key themes: Collaborations, Poetic Expansion, Cities and the Avant-Garde, New World Order and Artistic Expansion. The show concludes with the installation Islas (Islands), produced exclusively for the exhibition, in which López Cuenca proposes a critical re-reading of historical texts and engravings linked to the "discovery" of America.
