Rogelio López Cuenca's works in the field of publishing are based on a subtle re-reading and alteration of the meaning of everyday objects, scenes and cultural constructs through the juxtaposition of images and text. As a philologist grounded in semiotics, López Cuenca propagates the idea that we live surrounded by signs which, by nature, have multiple meanings that are activated in line with their context. In the early 1990s he undertook a series of works based on the covers of well-known magazines associated with the consumer society and the celebration of a culture of leisure and personal image, such as Vogue, Yachting, Elle, Donna and, in this case, men's magazine Uomo, the content of which tends to build up a certain image of attractive, powerful, successful Western men. He displaces that message based on the different meanings of the word uomo as the title of the magazine and in its literal sense as the Italian word for 'man'. López Cuenca produces a cover featuring two men linked to the dawn of the Soviet cultural revolution: the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the pioneering film-maker Sergei M. Eisenstein (other mock covers feature personalities such as painter Aleksander Rodchenko and conceptual artist Joseph Beuys). Deliberately not trying to mask the way in which he alters the images from the magazine, he places the title Uomo on the photo in thick red oil-paint, with no attempt to cover its gestural, material form in a play on words that references a revolutionary utopia in which painting on easels is superseded by graphic art, words, design and film.

These works were produced at the time when the Soviet Union was breaking up. They feature the altered use of revolutionary symbols and bear witness to the dissolution and absorption of a watered-down version of those symbols by petit-bourgeois culture. Juan Antonio Ramírez writes that 'this group of pictures works because of its juxtaposition of two opposing conceptual areas, and viewers need to be aware of both in order to understand them. [...] Works such as this are a huge slap in the face for the post-Communist world's complacent view of itself'.

Ramírez's statements can be seen even more conclusively (although the format of the work is smaller) in Odessa, produced in 1992 and linked to a series of works in which López Cuenca appropriated the brand image of the Expo ’92 Universal Exhibition in Seville, e.g. in his intervention on the signs at the Expo venue entitled Décret nº 1 (1992, Museo Reina Sofía). Expo ’92 opened just a few months after the signing of the Treaty of Belavezha, which formalised the break-up of the giant Soviet state. The celebrations surrounding the Expo marked the entry of Spain onto the international stage and confirmed its historical links with the Americas, which had already been reinforced a few years earlier when it joined NATO. In an unprecedented combination of the genesis of the Soviet Union and its disintegration, López Cuenca takes a single frame from a famous scene in the film Battleship Potemkin (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925), which was a real icon of the Russian revolution: the massacre of civilians on the steps of the Ukrainian city of Odessa by the White Army of the Czarist state. On that image, already burned into the retinas of millions of cinema-goers, López Cuenca sticks a number of replicas of the gleaming armillary sphere that served as the logo of Expo ’92. In an association that links the playful, triumphant optimism of late-period capitalism with the impacts of bullets, he lets those logos tumble down the steps like destructive, rolling projectiles and icons of the Western world and of capitalism triumphant at the end of the 20th century, when the 'end of history' was augured. The logo becomes ammunition supporting the cossacks of the Czar's White Army in their indiscriminate charge against the people, to suggest a post mortem victory of the old regime supported, decades after its fall, by the new world order.

Carlos Martín