Marco Prieto (1992) graduated in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid in 2014, he began his artistic career influenced and interested in political events and war conflicts at the beginning of the century, as well as social revolutions. The question of violence, between the different historical periods, leads him to be interested in it as a productive engine that generates radical changes and questions our own nature. Around these concerns, Marco begins to develop his own work.
It seems that violence belongs exclusively to the human being and is synthesized to a bad option, or from another more modern perspective: the most cowardly option. It is important to analyze the origin of violence, the relationship we have with it and how it connects us with the material world in which we live and in which we have developed from the beginning. Marco uses painting as an ambivalent substance that allows building from a gesture that is a priori destructive, overcoming the romantic relationship with the portrait, Marco radicalizes it on a battlefield.
It explores the skill of using violence within the pictorial framework as an effective technique for the formalization of faces, searching for the powerful countenance that underlies the individualistic maelstrom and that decisively challenges the viewer's human condition. Simultaneously, it reflects on the ways of operating and influencing violence in the construction of our identity through symbology, questioning its usefulness, its limits, its intention, its origin, its desire and its representation.
In these terms, Marco gives these faces a setting, an atmosphere and attributes, turning them into characters with their own nature that represent, as contemporary allegories, classic concepts that are once again remarkable today..
MARCO PRIETO
