Marco Maggi — Déplier — Xippas Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 5 → October 17, 2015

Marco Maggi — Galerie Xippas Poursuivant la présentation en cours de ses travaux à la Biennale de Venise, où il occupe le pavillon de l’Uruguay, Marco Maggi propose, avec « Déplier », une exposition subtile qui se dérobe au regard pour mieux en cerner la nature. Un œuvre fort, sensible et poétique qui déploie sa magie dans l’espace avec une grâce déroutante.

“We live in a dysfunctional society where information is forever present, reality has become illegible, and visual arts invisible.”

Continuing in the same vein as his exhibition Global Myopia at the Uruguay Pavilion in the Venice Biennale, Marco Maggi’s project obliterates the distance between spectator and artwork and creates a new visual experience. The microscopic drawings, undetectable at a distance, become visible as the spectator approaches the work.

Maggi’s universe chiefly consists of a system of cutouts arranged in a linear motif of alternating solids and hollows that dangle from sheets of paper or the surfaces of a wall. These patterns create a surface depth that is at once unsettling and discrete. This structure grows organically forming a rhizome that stretches on for eternity. The spectator follows the twists on this imaginary map and plunges into an all-encompassing environment.

Maggi’s drawings evoke writing. Each pattern that is sketched in detail, cut out, and detached from its surface becomes a new character that enriches the artist’s cryptic language. His vocabulary develops throughout each artwork, generating new forms that function like hermetic texts in this space: the exhibition becomes a narrative.

Marco Maggi’s project unfolds throughout the space and mingles with its architecture. Fanfold II, a floating staircase of paper, serves as a poetic introduction to the show. The spectator enters the main room and is led along a lengthy line down the walls. The white drawings that delicately paper the white walls create a fragile and almost unperceivable bas-relief of an unreadable sentence that leads us to Drawing Machine (Black and White: 10 possible starting points), an installation of pencils. These pencils, attached to the wall by ropes stretched like arcs, transform into arrows. The artwork’s extreme strength and pure simplicity compounds the tension present at the exact moment of creation, when a pencil touches the paper’s surface. While the surrounding pieces reference the delineated zones where Maggi’s abstract code plays out, Stacking Quote (East Black Cachet) more literally embodies the relationships with writing. The tiny drawings, similar to the characters, escape from the pages of notebooks, now closed and in a pile. The words — finally freed — fly away.

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Marco Maggi was born 1957 in Montevideo, Uruguay. He works and lives in New York City. His artworks are part of many prestigious collections, including those of MoMA, New York; Whitney Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Drawing Center, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

His artworks are currently on display at the Uruguay Pavilion at the Venice Biennale until November 22, 2015. His exhibition “Unfolding Marco Maggi” at the Josée Bienvenu Gallery in New York opens September 10th.