A famous song by Leonard Cohen narrates that love is a march. In everyday life, we march as winners and we march as losers. Thus, Tony Solis new photography project presented at the Enrique Guerrero Gallery in Mexico City, Love is not a victory march, includes stories that could belong to the march of a melancholy and contemporary Sisyphus, as well as to the steps of an imprudent but ambitious Telemachus, or even, of a persevering Titan Atlas, that even exhausted of taking the heavens upon his shoulders, perceiving he is being observed, looks at us with a quiet smile without anger or resentment.

It doesn’t matter if the march is of victory or defeat. The Mexican photographer is interested in presenting frames of this existential journey, its transitions, moments, expectations and crisis, all the steps of the path, the inner looks, as well as the end that is part of the collective experience. He portrays the sense of departure and the sense of the arrival, but also the beauty of those uncertain stopovers that allow us to reach the destination. He presents the subtle weight of wounds through the photographic image. Without gravity, with an observational, mild, uncorrupted consciousness.

Tony Solis is interested in the narration of the existential experience, in resistance rather than surrender, in the description of an upcoming moment, of breath and scars, waiting for what is going to happen. And there is beauty in all of this. There is truth, there is a sober, essential and gentle order. There is the story of the present narrated through the language of observation.

This is an epic story of vulnerable warriors, a chronicle of the fragility of youthness and of that courage related to the struggle for ideals. The whole human story begins from an energetic spark that destroys, expresses, creates forms, invites us to start an incessant journey that can take place only in the contemporary moment.

The wounds of history, even the biographical ones, require an imperceptible but accurate look. The shots of Solis doesn’t offers a mythology of the hero, not even the emphasis on fight or violence, but rather an acceptance of all aspects of existence, including the most dissonant. And he makes it in an excellent way.  So, we ask ourselves: “Where is the margin between defeat and victory? What is fragility indeed more than another name of strength?”

There is a continuity with the previous solo show of the artist (La marcha de los gatitos apachurrados, 2015) which represents an homage to a Japanese animation video starring some cats playing musical instruments, entitled “Mitchirineko”, and the music of Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen .

Tony Solis is a Mexican artist originally from Monterrey who is particularly active in the contemporary art circuit. In addition to participating in numerous art fairs and collective exhibition events, he has collaborated with various international magazines and founded the PANICO magazine. He won the prize of Latin-American photography Purificación García (Zona Maco, 2012). The exhibition Love is not a victory march will be open until July 25 in the spaces of the Guerrero Gallery in Mexico City.

Giuliana Schiavone

Info:

http://galeriaenriqueguerrero.com/