Fabian Marcaccio:Variants, CAAM, Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderna
Curated by Octavio Zaya
March 22-June 2, 2013
Fabian
Marcaccio
Variants
Fabian Marcaccio’s prolific career starts at the
beginning of the nineties and continues until now. His singular work could be
seen as a field of experimentation, research and analysis on the capability,
the willpower and the resistance of the traditional medium that is “painting”
to survive in our present context. By
this we mean technological innovations, computing saturation and the digital
era, all of which have modified deeply our way to perceive and articulate the
world we live in.
Variants attempts to
bring us closer to the variants of Marcaccio’s generative and multiple
universe. It is a universe in constant change, which the artist has developed
step by step, conceptually, physically and visually, as a response to pictorial
entropy.
Marcaccio has gone beyond the conventions of painting
and painterly flatness –which he used to deal with during his Abstract
Expressionism period, when he decided to live in New York in the eighties–. He
has developed a challenging and rigorous practice that ranges from transfer
prints and digital and industrial techniques to the pictorial processes
involved in spatial concerns and their expansion into the realms of sculpture
and architecture. The result is a painting practice that is in constant
expansion: sometimes environmental, sometimes three-dimensional and definitely
sculptural, sometimes in the form of animation and on many other occasions as
transition and mutation.
During the nineties, Marcaccio started to develop what
he called “Paintants”, a term that he created from the fusion between
“painting” and “mutant”. From that moment onwards, this Argentine artist began
a de-construction –or a sort of dis-bodiment–
of the pictorial practice, inspired by the dynamic relationship (sometimes
collapsed) between elements and overcrowdings that attract and string one
another, link up and get activated in time and space. Sometimes the artist
shows us the frames of the piece, resorts to sackcloth and other fabrics,
photographic images and media references, and applies different media over
digitally printed surfaces. Marcaccio uses oil paintings and acrylic, silicon
and sand, ropes and structures made of plastic, wood and aluminum. He also uses
brushstrokes saturated with color, white or colorless silicon, and sticks them
to the surface and the schemes and nets in his works, or extends them from
these to the walls, the floor or the air itself.
The excess that results from Marcaccio’s painterly
surfaces –something that moves between growth and decadence–, is never stable.
The surface events change all the time and we cannot grasp the work either as a
whole or as a unity. On the contrary, the way Marcaccio’s work spreads out
suggests multiplicity and crowding, physically and visually speaking. The constant
change we often mention is visible, above all, in his gigantic environmental
pieces, which ooze an architectural style, and in his so called Structural Canvas Paintants. In turn,
physicality and visual excess, and his ever growing sculptural tendency are
even more evident in his most recent tableaus
and in his “rope paintings”. It is precisely for his sculptural quality that he
was granted the famous Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture.
In his works of the latest years, Marcaccio seems keen
on dealing with contemporary issues and images referring to society, economy
and politics –which includes everything, from bank crises to terrorism–. His works compose a hallucinatory and
kaleidoscopic contemporary history, pervaded by the media saturation of our
times, particularly in the United States. His main sources are internet and the
newspapers. In all of these pieces, the idea that prevails is the same
recurring allegory that can be found in the whole of Marcaccio’s work: the
breakdown of the subject and the fragmentation of the body. Everything seems to
take place within a sort of explosion that provokes a pictorial otherness and
makes clear, once more, that autonomy is nothing but a fallacy.
-Octavio Zaya, 2013
