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“My intention is to evoke the idea of an underground river that passes through all the objects displayed, even though I cannot name that river.” *
Like a short stories book, The Stature of Liberty – Jorge Macchi’s sixth solo show at Luisa Strina gallery – brings together a diverse group of works, suggesting a non-monolithic understanding of the whole. The exhibition is a journey through some of the artist’s obsessions: memory, the ephemeral, transparency, ghosts, echoes, the representation of sound, the idea of replica, the subversion of logic, the disintegration of images.
* The multiplicity of media has to do with the specific relationship I attempt to establish between images and materials. In general, the thing that’s most important about a piece should move behind the surface, and, in this sense, the variety of media I use matters very little. In general, when I show my work, I try to allow works that are materially very different from one another to coexist.
Jorge Macchi, Edgardo Rudnitzky interview for Bomb magazine, New York, USA 2009.
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Drift bottle 7 (testigo de deriva) [Drift bootle 7 (drift witness)], is a plastic bottle of mineral water that contains inside the scale reproduction of a sailing ship. The title refers to the bottles, thrown into the sea with data on the date and place where they were thrown, to learn about the movement of surface currents. This piece is, at the same time, a message in a bottle, a world enclosed in a plastic bubble, and a distant reference to the Island of Plastic, the largest accumulation of plastic floating and moving in the Pacific Ocean.
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The Amoeba Strategy
The work La estrategia de la ameba [The Amoeba Strategy, 2022] is a self-moving suitcase on wheels that travels across the room; upon colliding with an obstacle (wall, object, plinth, visitor) it stops, turns 180 degrees and continues its journey until a new obstacle appears. The amoeba, lacking a nervous system, interacts with its surrounding environment through its cell membrane: when faced with a noxious, irritating or nutritional stimulus, it reacts in a primary way by approaching or moving away from it. The suitcase, in addition to being a stubborn and voracious visitor to the exhibition, constantly establishes new relationships between the works.
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"The power of Jorge Macchi's work lies as much in what is said as in what is kept silent. It could be said that his work vacillates between large presences and absences: almost ghost-like, it operates according to what is revealed or vanishes in situations that perplex us. One of the main entities or phenomena that undergoes this manipulation in his work is sound, which comes before us in a wide variety of intensities, from mute evocations to elaborate compositions." (Alejandra Aguado)
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Short story, Avión, Septiembre 2020, Mapa y Relief [Short story, Plane, September 2020, Map and Relief] are small works made with piano string that hang fragilely from the walls, and reduce scale schemes, calendar diagrams and folded papers almost to the point of their disappearance.
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Confesión
Confesión [Confession] is a cardboard box of a 50-inch smart TV with a ll of its sides hollowed in the shape of a cross repeated, like a module, which refers to the perforated metal of the confessionals. The box no longer holds any object but has been transformed by the action of the openwork into a visual instrument that allows a fragmented view of its interior and what is behind it.
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Jorge Macchi
Puntos suspensivos 04, 2019tinta acrílica sobre papel
[acrylic paint on paper]
150 x 150 cm cada [each]
59 1/8 x 59 1/8 in -