Apolo(s) (1979-1996). Armando Cristeto. MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
Apolo(s) (1979-1996). Armando Cristeto. MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
Apolo(s) (1979-1996). Armando Cristeto. MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
Apolo(s) (1979-1996). Armando Cristeto. MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
Apolo(s) (1979-1996). Armando Cristeto. MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
Apolo(s) (1979-1996). Armando Cristeto. MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
Apolo(s) (1979-1996). Armando Cristeto. MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
Apolo(s) (1979-1996). Armando Cristeto. MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
Apolo(s) (1979-1996). Armando Cristeto. MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
Apolo(s) (1979-1996). Armando Cristeto. MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025
MEMORIA presents the first solo exhibition in Europe of Armando Cristeto (Mexico City, Mexico, 1957).
Photographer, writer, teacher and curator, Armando Cristeto Patiño was initially trained in the discipline of medicine. His approach to the photographic medium operates from the interdisciplinary and experimental, marked by his early participation in the late 1970s in the Independent Photographers Group and the collective Peyote and the Company. Both initiatives were promoted, among others, by his brother Adolfo Patiño, who would also have a decisive influence on the expanded photographic practice of his work.
The exhibition Apolo(s) (1979-1996) proposes a curatorial gaze that seeks to deconstruct one of the author’s most emblematic series, “Apolo Urbano” (1980-1989). Through a record of visual essays of bodies of work unknown or unpublished to date, a duality is presented between the marked, stigmatized and violated body with series such as “El Condón” (1979) or “(S)Obras Completas” (1980), an action carried out on violence with Peyote and the Company.
SELECTION OF WORK
In contrast, Cristeto finds the possibility of escape and surrealist resurgence through the inspiration of Manuel Álvarez Bravo and his “Buena Fama Durmiendo, Homenaje a Don Manuel” (1979), followed in “Apolo Urbano” by a return to the normative canon of the sanitized body and an award-winning masculinity, where he enters the universe of bodybuilding, this time, from a scopic, playful and homoerotic drive.
This look of hedonistic freedom and a certain frivolity is expanded in his immersion in the glamorous nightlife and countercultural movement of Mexico City in the eighties with his “Noches del Reventón” (1980-1989), or in his incessant captures of the first LGBTQIA+ Pride marches (1980-1988). The most recent collages and expanded photographic works, made between 1989 and 1996, delve from humor into the multidisciplinary look of the author without renouncing to his main questions, from an absence of the formal concern of the purist medium of photography.
