Jorge Macchi: PrestidigitadorMUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico
Past gallery exhibitions exhibition
Overview
Installation view, Jorge Macchi: Prestidigitator, MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico, 2014
Jorge Macchi uses a range of media to raise tensions between our logical understanding of the world and our sensory and emotional experience of it. The specifics of the medium is central to its working methodology. In this exhibition he turns to painting.
Prestidigitator comprises seven oil paintings that put into play the contradiction of sensory experience they offer and the expectations of visual culture. It is an elaborate system of obstacles and diversions. Interrupted images where the surface of industrial geometric shapes continually compete with a background that remains fragmented and undecipherable. The relatively sparing nature of these paintings, their strangeness, their lack of representation rejects the assumptions and visual habits of so-called abstract painting and resist revealing a personalized origin of definitive images, or a supposed “world view.” On the contrary: Macchi’s paintings present themselves as an elaborate and careful development of an undefined object, a kind of scene without clear values, but each of its niches, cutouts and surfaces is capable of accommodating our gaze with incessant activity. Like a conjuror, the painter conceals both the objet and meaning.
It might be said that its greatest offer is to consume time in this way: to engage our gaze with elements that, consciously or unconsciously, refer to modes of seeing that are historically inherited from the history of painting, but presented without any concrete link to any of these references. Macchi’s work activates a negotiation between the insignificance of his images and the time for reflection and contemplation they require. Insisting on a view of painting as a recipient of a difficulty that is not resolved through the interpretation of production of signs, requires a series of deviations that, through specific negations, makes present to the viewer their condition as an agent.
Curator: Alejandra Labastida
Installation Views
Installation view, Jorge Macchi: Prestidigitator, MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico, 2014
