Fuegos de artificio / Juegos de artificio
Fireworks / Games of artifice
Footprints that expand until becoming an explosion, empty newspaper headlines, an out of focus video installation, patterns on the wall that give way to the law of gravity and even a mechanism for circulation without blood: with the impeccable impact that has marked his career, Jorge Macchi presents “Fuegos de artificio” in the Ruth Benzacar gallery, a show about the power of art to reveal all the worlds contained in this one.
By Fabián Lebenglik



“Fuegos de artificio” (Fireworks) are the ultimate pomp, the crowning touch of a celebration. Lights, explosions of colors and sounds, shimmering forms that are fleetingly drawn in the sky to gain attention, to attract and distract.

The artifice of attraction/distraction gives a twist to the viewer's attention, to the reader's, the listener's, to place them, for a moment, within a new logic, where for an instant, the world becomes pure, sustained expectation, awaiting surprise, discovery, astonishment.

(…)
In Jorge Macchi's work, art is a residue that filters through holes in reality, and in the same way, but in inverse terms, reality is a residue that strains through the holes in art. Each of the artist's pieces has some rupture in everyday logic as its starting point: they open another path in the routine structure of everyday life, establishing a new relationship between objects and one's perception of objects. Each new work establishes basic and novel connections regarding their function, where the first subtle rupture comes about in the physical relationship between objects.

(…)
The idea of artifice convoked by the show's title immediately suggests the concept of fiction. The notion of something constructed in a laboratory. For Macchi, this idea has various ramifications. On one hand, the artist was obsessed with the nature of the accidental and produced a large quantity of works related to this theme. Using different techniques and working in different disciplines, he reproduced a series of accidents in theoretical terms (from a car accident to broken glass), and from there, he also went on to explore crime, murder, social and family violence as subjects for his work.

(…)
The work that gives the show its title is a sequence that shows a muddy footprint made by a boot sole, almost like a rubber stamp. Based on this image, the artist continues expanding the marks and disintegrating the constitution of the sole's form in a sequence that explodes the footprint until converting it into a series of symbols that evoke an explosion. What would be evidence for a detective, a clue, for Macchi, always produces new readings, new possibilities.

(…)
With similar procedures, the artist presents a diagram of the veins and arteries of the circulatory system and diagrams of parts of the heart and brain, but what is absent here is the body, the heart, the brain. The only things left are the labels and the arrows.

(…)
As in all of his work, Macchi's new show goes intelligently from laboratory of fiction to the real and from the real to the laboratory. Art always erupts into the world and constructs another, parallel one, like a model where different laws govern.


Fabián Lebenglik
Página 12, Buenos Aires, May 12, 2002.