Marco Maggi: exPECTACLE

Uruguayan Marco Maggi’s needle-thin line drawing webs, nearly invisibly, across surfaces of aluminum, mat black, and paper white. Drawings perceptible only through the shadows they cast are made of the most modest materials. Inscriptions (or encryptions) in Maggi’s vocabulary of “pre-Columbian and post-Clintonian” abstraction suggest incomprehensible alphabets, genome mapping and satellite surveillance. The vast and infinitesimal are identical.

The seemingly empty universe is dense with inaccessible information. Deafening white noise.

A three-thousand-square-foot paper carpet of intricate incisions and microsculptural monuments casts diminutive shadows that might represent great un-built cities or bacterial colonies. The echoes of Carl Andre and Felix Gonzales-Torres are only formal. Maggi is not about walking on or picking up, but crouching down and looking at. A myopic intimacy that is not only informative, but transformative.

In the past two years Maggi has completed installations at the Sao Paulo Biennial; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Buenos Aires; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Santiago, Chile; The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City; Centro Cultural de Espana, Montevideo; the III and IV Bienal del Mercursor in Brazil as well as galleries in New York, Houston, London, Rome, and Sao Paulo. In October, he will install his piece called inCUBAdora at the VIII Bienal de la Habana.