Marco Maggi – Turn Left

Marco Maggi

Turn Left

12.04.12 26.05.12

Xippas Paris Past
[:en]Marco Maggi, View of the exhibition “Turn Left”, 2012[:fr]Marco Maggi, Vue de l’exposition “Turn Left”, 2012[:es]Marco Maggi, “Turn Left”, 2012[:]

Marco Maggi proposes and promotes moments of suspension. In this society where speed reigns, where spectacular images pile up one after another, trivializing and canceling each other, the artist urges a cautious observation of those around us. His video “Micro & Soft on Macintosh Apple,” produced with Ken Solomon, retraces the slow mutations of a decomposing apple and the processes of its fossilization through reversed time-lapse photography. We are immediately plunged into the heart of Marco Maggi’s work, which questions our relationship to time and knowledge.

For his first exhibition at the Xippas Gallery (Paris), the artist traces with precision the gallery’s architecture, defined by constant left turns. He invites us to follow a line that appears simple: it is a path made from reams of A4 paper aligned on the floor. Through his use of simple materials manufactured for everyone’s use (such as sheets of paper, aluminum, apples, or even envelopes), the artist unfurls a topographic map of details linked to everyday life, privileging the micro over the macro, and urges us to come closer to his meticulous objects.

Marco Maggi’s work is an act of resistance. It doesn’t try to be grandiloquent or shocking. Through the observation of Plexiglas cubes, which at first glance seem transparent, or seemingly white sheets, we see interlaced designs of the barren with the abundant, subtle and almost impalpable reliefs that stand out from flat surfaces, the lack of contradiction between the surface and the support, and the interdependence between the recto and the verso. These precious objects reveal to us an infinite and delicate web budding with intimate relationships and the feeling of the sublime.

For Marco Maggi, drawing intervenes when words falter. His drawings become writing and form their own language. The stroke of the pen, which falls between text and texture, explains nothing – only the tension with the reader matters. In the series “The Ted Turner Collection – From CNN to the DNA,” the reproductions of the modern masters are covered in order to leave only glimpses that are hardly recognizable. Similar to a memory, the artist adds layers and obliterates the original image. In homage to media, he covers information and emphasizes, “each day, we are damned to know more and understand less.”

Acting as visual haikus – their meaning remains enigmatic – the drawings merge with the space and form a constellation of scattered forms. Delicately and tenderly, the red, yellow, or blue sheets release discreet signals that meter our pace, functioning as colored stains, shadows, or reflections.

Through his use of printmaking, drawing, carving, superposition, and light, Marco Maggi always intervenes in a subtle manner in order to plunge us into the complex rhizome connecting separate universes. “Turn left” leads us into an oscillation of maps, lenses, and landscapes, whether they are real or imaginary, wonderful or idealized. Marco Maggie takes into account the in-between and the intervening spaces in all relationships by allowing for the experience of multiple realities and highlighting the proliferation of possibilities.

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