Jorge Macchi
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1963
From his first exhibitions in the late eighties to the present, Jorge Macchi's work has managed to develop a syntax of its own. Trained at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, his works combine the multiple strategies of conceptualism with an imagination aware of unsuspectedly significant details of reality. His work has filled the halls of museums, galleries, and international biennials with minimal accidents, formal paradoxes, fortuitous operations, musical references, and games of illusion that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, between the past and the present. His works unfold in a wide range of media that goes from video and photography to visual and sound installation, passing through watercolor, painting, and drawing. Far from the more sentimental modulations of the conceptual poetics of the nineties, Macchi works with the concentration and versatility of someone who operates a sensitive laboratory; of someone who carries out an artistic project centered on a systematic research on how the gaze works.
In this sense, the artist's search aims at a depersonalized but common ground of emotions, memories, and images, whose distortion, sometimes imperceptible, allows for identification as well as surprise. Transparent walls that, instead of blocking, exhibit; chromatically graduated bricks that generate the sensation of depth; two identically shattered glasses; plays of light solidified in space; fictitious scenarios produced by an accidental theater of shadows; fragmented collages; each operation of the artist entails a paradox, a trick, an optical effect, a way of summoning the invisible or the immaterial. In this territory, reminiscent of Borges, contradictory sensations or concepts coexist, rooted in a defamiliarized everyday life that insists on translating the untranslatable: silence, absence, reflection. As if, underneath his works, there were a small compendium of wisdom which states that the things surrounding us are made of emptiness.
