Gallery 2
September 10 to October 17 2014

Press Release

In the Tecnirama series, images transform and acquire a new meaning by being associated and proposed in a whole new context. Through a series of drawings, the artist resorts to a game of association that resignifies the image by appropriating two icons of the American culture: “Captain America” and the “Art in America” magazine, as well as the Tecnirama Encyclopedia, which enjoyed a certain degree of popularity in Latin America and was published by the Codex publishing house in the seventies. This encyclopedia contained the latest information on science, technology, geology, biology, physics, chemistry and math. Through these associations, Mojica builds stories based on the images and the books he finds by chance, where the child dressed up as the American patriotic hero reads the Art in America magazine as he learns how the world around him works to then understand how this other world, the art world, operates by reading a magazine… or vice versa.

Marco Mojica studied Fine Arts in Universidad del Atlántico and received the first edition of the Fernando Botero award in 2005, winning first place, and second place in the Two-Dimensional Art Salon of the Gilberto Alzate Avendaño Foundation in 2003.

He has shown his works in several solo exhibitions in different cities all over the world, and his work is part of renowned collections such as the UBS Bank Collection, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the D’Arenberg Collection in Switzerland, the Asiaciti Trust collection in Singapore, the COF Foundation in Spain and the Barzilai – Hollander Collection in Belgium, among others.

The exhibitions will be open to the public until Saturday, October 11, at the new location of Galería El Museo: Calle 81 No. 11 – 41. Monday to Friday: 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. and Saturdays: 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Free admission.



In this exhibition, Marco Mojica is once again combining second-hand information and images (images that are being disseminated throughout social media or printed media) that is to say, he is once again playing with history (according to Agamben, artists, like children, play with history) with the taste and technical mastery he is so well known for. It is clear that the technique (the control of the mind and the eye over the hand and the use of the media) is crucial in Mojica’s work. This way, this exhibition can be seen as a homage to “technique”, and more specifically, as a homage to that old encyclopedia kept at his house and that he used to scrutinize with the eyes of a marveled child full of wonder (or suspicion), where he used to find information both about the beaks of birds and the reason why things float.

Thus, in this exhibition, Mojica shares some details of his beloved Tecnirama (published by the Argentinian publisher Codex, which, curiously, also published comics until it closed down in 1978): we are witnesses to its name, number of volumes, the color of its cover, its dimensions and some of its illustrations… and the most remarkable thing about it is, undeniably, how worn down it is, how old, how expired. This exhibit is then an ode to the past, an ode to the yellowish paper of those books with broken covers that taught him, from his house library, how the world works.

However, the old encyclopedia is not alone in this exhibition. In the large format drawings, a boy dressed up as Captain America is browsing the encyclopedia, as well as the number dedicated to the art market of Art in America. And the combination of this visual information begins to insinuate other things (in order to fully enjoy Mojica’s work, we must do the same as his masked character: we must carefully scrutinize what is being presented to us, as an agile and fun-loving child searching for clues as to what to do next). And at this point the illustration is broken. The linear (encyclopedic) reading of the work is shattered and multiplied; it becomes ironic and elusive and fills us with doubt. Why is Mojica connecting a character from the American comic, an encyclopedia and an American magazine dedicated to the art market? Is science, like art, a fiction which feasibility is little more than an agreement? Why is our small hero reading that art magazine with suspicion? Without a doubt, the gaze (the gesture) of the dressed-up child gives us a clue: in such an eminently visual and promiscuous society as ours, we have to see and we have to read the information attacking us from all flanks with care, because neither art or comics or science are what they seem.

Indeed, image (and its manipulation) has become the most lethal weapon in the history of humanity. Captain America knows, the people at Art in America know, and Marco Mojica knows, of course.