Artists: Jorge Macchi
The works by Jorge Macchi in Casa Abierta present some common features that define some his main concerns: our relationship with place, fate and death. The pieces, some of which are made by employing chance and accident, offer us a poetic elaboration on fragility.
Both Buenos Aires Tour and Parallel Lives began with an action: the breaking of a pane of glass. In the case of the book, the glass was initially placed over a plan of the city of Buenos Aires so the produced fractures would become chance itineraries to walk and discover. Buenos Aires Tour is the product of collaboration with a writer -Maria Negroni- and a musician - Edgardo Rudnitsky. The three artists walked along the routes given by the smashing of the glass over the map of Buenos Aires and each of them collected their experience in their respective artistic languages, producing a multidisciplinary record of the city's hidden faces.
Most of Macchi's artworks are constructed from the capture of ephemeral moments, and such are the anecdotes, images, objects and sounds recorded in the book: fleeting details - often overlooked -short lived sounds and uncanny encounters constitute the flesh of this uncovered city of Macchi, a Buenos Aires that can't be found in ordinary tourist guides. Macchi has stated about this work: "More than anything, it is a type of autobiography; this city is a mirror wherein the choice of a distinct object or sound will reflect each of us, via our preferences and through elements of our past."
In Vidas Paralelas / Parallel Lives two sheets of glass displayed side by side reveal an identical pattern of cracks, as if designed with mathematical precision. The first sheet was smashed by throwing a hammer onto the glass, and the second created by painstakingly imitating the accidental design with a cutter. This method complicates any ideas of chance and accident as it brings together unrestrained violence and the most calculated precision cutting. In its clever manipulation of illusion, the artist seems to be insinuating that reality and fiction are made of the same substance.
The extraordinary is enacted in the make up of Untitled and Obituario / Obituary. The first, an uncomfortable object that juxtaposes ideas of fragility and the body through the poetic alliance of the pillow and its broken glass cover, seems to follow on the steps of the most breathtaking visual associations made by the masters of Surrealism. In Obituario, a work from a series made with cut out newspaper, only religious symbols from the obituary page survive the painstaking gesture of carving out the anecdotal from the minimal account of death.
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Untitled
1993 Fabric and glass on pillow 20 x 65 x 30 cm. All works
by Jorge Macchi are shown by courtesy of UECLAA (University
of Essex Collection of Latin American Art)
Vidas Paralelas / Parallel Lives
1996 - 1998 Broken glass 84 x 61 cm. All works by Jorge
Macchi are shown by courtesy of UECLAA (University of
Essex Collection of Latin American Art)
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