First appeared in Tema Celeste, contemporary art, Nº 92.

Gabrius S.p.A., 2002

Jorge Macchi’s work resists straightforward exegesis. Rather than linear progressions moving from point A to point B, they present themselves to the viewer as intricate networks of semantic densities. Conceiving information as knowledge that comes from everywhere and ends nowhere, Macchi creates many of his works out of newspapers –the paradigm of informational archives relying on facts. But facts almost never add up to anything, and we tend to forget them the moment we close the newspaper.
In the spirit of that peculiar London institution where everyone has the chance to get up on a soapbox and talk freely, The Speaker’s Corner (2002) is formed from several newspaper clippings held with pins on wood. By cutting off the words and leaving only the quotation marks visible, the Argentine-born artist seems to suggest that the problem of transmitting a message today is unaffected by whether the communication is vitally important. Language approaches the condition of pure noise, an index of entropy that slides, according to the inexorable tendency of any closed system, towards a state of increasing disorder. Indeed, entropy is the basic premise behind many of Macchi’s works, leading us to comprehend the arbitrary, predetermined, and artificial structures that order our lives. Ornamento (2002) is a latex-painted wall with a flower pattern that seems to have suddenly begun to crumble to the floor. The same concept informs Les feuilles mortes, in which the typical holes and lines of notebook paper collapse as if pulled by the force of gravity. Shaped by the experience of several residencies in France, the Netherlands, England, and Germany, reality for Macchi has become elusive. Like the Situationists, who sought to reinvent everyday life by constructing events that disrupted the ordinary, he is interested in creating the conditions of a parallel reality. Macchi’s works have an uncanny ability to undermine our certainties, to articulate fully the ambiguous zones of our consciousness. He creates a fiction so radical that it can bring its audience to look with fresh wonder at the structure and meaning of experience. His work is an elegy to the absence of a unified vision of the world.

By María Gainza