Jorge Macchi: Perspectiva

Museo de Arte Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires, Argentina

The title Perspectiva [Perspective] refers to a look that goes from the present to the artist’s personal and experiential past expressed in his life work. But it also evokes a constant in Macchi’s work: reality’s tendency towards dissolution, and the fictitious quality of the signs that populate the world.

 

Jorge Macchi has been developing for decades an open work, rigorous yet poetic. He works with everyday images and transforms them with plays of lights and shadows, sequential dynamics and repetition techniques that end up creating suggestive perception effects and altering the consensus vision. The urban environment, the signs of consumer society, and the history of art work as materials that the artist associates or confronts in collision or displacement conditions, generating doubts about the identity of the situations, or even the objects and beings. These manipulations take him to the world of fiction, in its illusionist dimension and into the space between dreams and reality. Macchi uses the emergence and dissolution of the story in situations that do not reach or go beyond the narrative. His works produce a suspense that destabilize the identity of things, and render the image uncertain and disturbing. The world becomes a stage of doubt and melancholy.

 

The exhibition proposes a journey through Macchi’s work but also his work’s travel across different contexts and countries such as Argentina, Mexico, Peru, and Colombia. It is a continuation, albeit with a different approach, of the recent retrospectives of the artist in Europe: Music Stand Still, SMAK (Ghent, 2011), and Container, Kunstmuseum Lucerne (2013).

Perspectiva goes beyond the halls of MALBA with two big installations. The first one, never seen before in Argentina, is Refracción (2012), and will be exhibited at Torcuato Di Tella University’s Sala de Arte from April 8 until June 3. The second one is a site-specific work made for the Museum of Fine Arts, and will be exhibited from April 15 till July 31, 2016.