Jorge Macchi

Galerie Peter Kilchmann is proud to announce the second solo exhibition of Argentinean artist Jorge Macchi (* 1963 in Buenos Aires, lives in Buenos Aires). There will be on view a space consuming installation, a floor sculpture, several works on paper and photographs.

“Twilight” is a collaboration with the musician Edgardo Rudnitzky. In this capacious installation a light bulb slides down a stretched wire until it reaches the opposite corner of the room. As the bulb travels across the space for a period of twenty minutes, the light will gradually dim. At the same time a musical piece is listened from a speaker mounted at the beginning of the course, the black out coinciding with the end of the piece. In the beginning a musician plays on a glass harmonica all the notes following a score composed by Edgardo Rudnitzky. In one moment the musician doesn’t play anymore one note, for example C. In this moment the resonance of the note C starts to be listened from the other angle of the room where there is a second speaker. In the end of the piece the musician plays just one note and from the other angle the overlay of all the notes can be heard. Music evolves to noise at the same time light evolves to darkness; the things we can clearly perceive in the beginning are blurred and disappear in the end of the piece. (This installation was exhibited for the first time in "Firstsite", University of Essex, England, 2006).

The triptych „Newsprint“(2008) consists of three colour prints in different formats (the largest piecehas a size of 180 x 80 cm, while the smallest measures 60 x 80 cm). They are scans from the sports sections of selected newspapers. In each of them, we can see a blurred image of a soccer player which is a cut-out of a larger press photograph. The main action seems to happen outside the fragment of the picture. By selecting this section, the artist deprives the beholder of the picture's initial intention.

In the floor sculpture “Souvenir” (2008), twenty yellow cardboard boxes make their way up to an imaginary sunstroke, which falls through a non-existing window into the gallery room. The ephemeral sun light turns into a fixed object.

„Shy“ (2008) is a smaller installation with six neutral papers in various formats and in different kinds of quality, which are fixed at the wall. The lines and margin of the sheets are drawn behind them, directly on the wall. Thus, the sheets hide their own ruling and they are absorbed by the wall.

Further works (watercolour on paper), that have been created with a fluid and fresh working method, complement the exhibition. In these works, as well as in his oeuvre in general, the artist questions issues and objects from everyday life and searches for the blurred, marginal and accidental aspects of them. Thus he creates pieces of art that hold their own poetry. In a clear, expressive manner and at the same time subtle language he attracts the viewer’s attention by placing the objects of his interest in a different context and thus creates suspense.

Jorge Macchi’s solo exhibition „The Anatomy of Melancholy" can be viewed in the Centre Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, until July 13th. It had previously been exhibited at the 6th Mercosur Biennal in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2007 and in the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Future exhibitions include participations at the Yokohama Triennale in Japan from September 13th until November 30th 2008 and at “Prospect.1”, New Orleans from November 1st 2008.