Crygasm

2010 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

Marco Rios

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This is a poignant and humorous self portrait that turns the camera on the artist’s own physical inability to cry. With non-stop cascades of “tears” coming down from his eyes, the impact of the work is in the contrast between the still image of the artist and the constant movement of the waterfalls flowing down. An image of impotency, it is also a beautiful “moving picture” in the formal sense. Going nowhere, resolving nothing, just a perpetual sorrow and pain, yet the viewer has no access to the source of this involuntary output of tears, or is the artist crying and lamenting for all of us. Again besides being a very beautiful work, and deep in its psychological treatment, there’s something very funny about it, and a wonderfully pathetic “fountain.”

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Marco Rios is an artist and curator working mainly in sculpture, performance, photography and video. Rios’ work often references existing narratives and typical genres spanning across mid-century cinema, Giallo, Film Noir and literature, which he uses to address themes and motifs that comprise those of flesh, death, paranoia, gore and delirium. With a certain sense of kitsch and mordant humour, Rios’ practice constantly revolves around his fascination for mortality, touched upon as both a casually mundane and deeply existential concept. The representation and presence of death in popular culture are explored through his work in projects as diverse as Despair Beyond Despair (2011), a performance in which he restages the murder scene of a notorious Dario Argento film, or Death’s Boutique (2010), which documents through sculptures, photographs and video a series of research trips on contemporary, ecological burial techniques in Sweden. Rios work is generally infused with a sense of melancholia, absurdism and radicalness through which are reflected common human conditions.

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Colors:

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• crying.n.01
• sorrow.n.01
• sadness.n.01
• poetic.a.01
• waterfall.n.01
• phantasmagoric.s.01