Fragments of a ceremonial circumscribing of space are evident in the work of Marcos Raya. Through an extension of his own personal space. Breaking boundaries, his “frontera” is filled with assemblages that takes life from the residue of crisis. His installations operate as both a self portrait and collective history. It is in the context of a merging dual reality of medical and psychological proportions. Repainted furniture, surgical supplies, baroque representations, small reliquaries and the use of plaster cast bodies are all open to his visual commentary. His active space is an aesthetic of abundance and display that presents traces of the ongoing struggles with the urban displacements. Rayas edge is both intimate in a domestic construction and sinister in a SPECTACLE OF PUBLIC DIMENSION. His affinity with surrealism, American pop, Mexican folk and rascuachismo tells the tale of an outsider artist from the inside. An artist who took inspiration from the alleys, streets, cantinas, factories and hospitals shows us the dark side of this very dark world of the 21st Century.
Marcos Raya has shown his work in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, the Smart Museum of the University of Chicago, the Snite Museum of the University of Notre Dame, the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. He was subject of a retrospective at Institution Ospicio Cabanas, Guadalajara, Mexico and a one man London show in 2013. Marcos Raya will be part of the upcoming exhibition “Surrealism the Configured Life” at Chicago’s MCA in the Fall of 2015
