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Ari Marcopoulos, "Out To Lunch", 2012

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Ari Marcopoulos “Out To Lunch”
published by PPP Editions

March 8 2013
6:26 PM

Among the many photographers from the turn of the millennium who depicted youth culture—Wolfgang TillmansTobias Zielony, Ryan McGinley—the Dutch-born, New York-based Ari Marcopoulos has been confronting his characters with their own urban backdrops, to the point of letting his subject’s own personas fade out, leaving the city alone to comment on them: no pubescent bodies, no identity-making process, no commentary on social scenarios, no documentary aims. Most of time, Marcopulous’ art is about the pure abstraction: black-and-white pictures of graffiti tattooing the cityscape. It’s extremely telling. Gallery owner, publisher of PPP Editions, and rare books dealer Andrew Roth has recently released Marcopulous’ ultimate book Out to Lunch. Featuring a small grouping of photographs taken during the ’80s and ’90s, the volume shows the artist’s roots in street photography. More recent, technically-altered and reinterpreted pictures are dispersed within the flow of image, which are also punctuated by high-gloss contact sheets, vinyl stickers, over-sized, fold-out color posters, and even a screenplay the artist wrote together with his son Cairo. The book is printed in a limited edition of 350 copies, each signed and numbered; consequentially, the work is not exactly cheap — it seems that even fanzines must sometimes be turned into coffee-table books. (Michele D’Aurizio)