Jorge Macchi, in 100 artistas latinoamericanos / 100 latin american artists. EXIT Publications, Madrid, 2007.

Jorge Macchi, Buenos Aires, 1963

Educated at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes of Buenos Aires, in 1987 he joined Grupo de la X, a group opposed to the Trans Avant-Garde neo-expressionism reigning at the time in his native country. However, and despite his initial training, the artist was soon to abandon the genre of painting and become engaged with the reductionist poetics of the ready-made and the objet trouvé, defining the work of art as a “mystery to investigate”. Encounters with objects, domestic accidents, non-productive walks…, Macchi’s pieces are born of anecdote and chance, from the everyday life of an artist bent on building mental equations that muddle and confuse our senses. On his palette, signs are decomposed, deconstructed and reordered according to new semantic and visual relationships that hark back to their original creative power. In this primitive setting, conceived as an essential enigma, the texts do not abide by our reading, the images are so subjective that we can hardly interpret them, the objects are revealed in opposition to their customary use, and the sounds act as the soundtrack accompanying the drama of our existence. This occurs, for example, in Música Incidental (1998), where chronicles from the crime reports are put into line form to take on the role of the lines of a musical score making manifest the violence of humankind. But also in La Ascensión, presented by Macchi at the Argentine Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2005, in which, underneath a Baroque fresco, the artist placed a trampoline mirroring the curves and reverse curves of the ceiling painting. The intimacy of the space was reinforced by darkness, and, above all, by the musical piece by Edgardo Rudnitzky composed for the event, and in which the acrobat’s jumps made for the continuous bass.
These two pieces, which were made almost a decade apart, serve to draw a closed circular segment in which works such as Fuegos de Artificio (2002), the series of photographs Citas (2002) and Dopplelganger (2005), represent other key junctures of his production. They all contain the same heuristic keystone: the print of a shoe on the wall is repeated and fades away until it becomes an explosion of fireworks, snapshots of objects and landscapes that acquire meaning through the author’s quotation marks, violent news stories that are rearranged, crisscrossed and distorted in order to shape abstract images very much like those from the Rorschach test… Any substance or circumstance can be the essence of the operation, as in Buenos Aires Tour (2003), where an accident, a broken piece of glass –again the reference to Duchamp-, superimposed on a Metro map, determines the route followed by the artist. The result: heaps of material compiled and spread around the exhibition space. A space that in Macchi’s work entails a very particular relationship with a viewer who, trapped in the dualities, incognitos and simultaneities, seems not to find any way out and to be condemned to wondering eternally in the labyrinth.

Alberto Sanchez Balmisa