American Insider

American Insider offers a portrait of the USA as it exists beyond its own borders—present in the collective imagination of the American Dream across the world, a dream that has already collapsed, shaped without ever being photographed on American soil.

American Insider creates a portrait of the North America that exists beyond its own borders, present in the collective imagination of the world’s population. The global landscape of many countries has adopted the shape of North American aspirations, manifested in the famous American Dream and expressed in pop culture and mass media.

The work showcases this country through its projections and reflections outside its territory. The result is a journey that is both physical and imaginary; subjective, yet collective; false, but entirely genuine.

The universe that North America represents for Mario Rey—Easy Rider, Jack Kerouac, Stephen Shore, Nicholas Ray, Steven Spielberg, Disney—composes the territory he has chosen to explore and forms a self-portrait where he seeks to project the subjectivity of his perspective on a cultural colonization that extends across the planet. This duality was already identified by John Szarkowski, the director of photography at MoMA in New York, in his exhibition essay Mirrors and Windows, where he clarifies the two possible positions any photographer can take in relation to the subjects captured by the camera.

On one hand, Rey uses this mirror to speak about himself and the numerous influences of American culture on his own identity, in his way of understanding and perceiving what surrounds him. At the same time, he pushes us as spectators to evaluate our vulnerability to these cultural stimuli that we also absorb almost with every involuntary breath. On the other hand, the author opens a window to the wild cultural colonization of the United States, its imposing aesthetic models, and its economic and political influence. And in this case, we become aware of the replacement of our architectural models or the barbarization of our language, but also of the death throes of this empire in the face of the unstoppable Chinese phenomenon.

Formally, Rey is seduced by the color palette of those photographers of the New American Color movement, using an appropriation strategy and consciously subverting the focus of attention. There is no longer room to glorify the great technological achievements of the Yankees, the endless highways, their virgin forests sweetened by Ansel Adams’ evasive framing, or the streets filmed countless times with a ballad in the background. The perspective and compositions are the same as those of the European painters who proliferated in the United States at the end of the 19th century, thanks to another colonizing element—the train—that carried with it the artistic iconography of the old continent to the Americas.

Observing this project as a spectator is tremendously stimulating; you find yourself constantly caught in a trap. Everything suggests that you are enjoying a visual journey across another continent, but there are certain clues, certain “errors” that the photographer has deliberately scattered. And although you begin to doubt what you see, your unconscious does not allow you to hesitate because each photograph will no longer be read as a representation of reality but as a landscape constructed from multiple conventions. American Insider is the invisible bridge in the schizophrenic rivalry between the physical and psychological landscapes.