Diáspora

Galleria Continua is pleased to present “Diáspora”, a new solo show by the Argentinian artist Jorge Macchi. The exhibition develops through a series of works in which the author studies the theme of the disintegration of the image.

The work that has the same name of the exhibition, “Diáspora”, is made up of forty- eight collages that correspond to pieces of a puzzle. Each collage shows the pattern of a game printed on paper but contains (glued in its correct position) a single tile which, in the final composition, forms an entire image. The distribution and exhibition of the collages throughout time in collections and places all around the world means that the reconstruction of the original and complete image is impossible.

In Jorge Macchi’s universe everything is in transit, everything is precarious. Nothing is permanent. His works echo absences: they are the true protagonists of the works, absences that are so strong they are almost present. He is an artist of loss and of nostalgia. In “Amarcord” the image of the poster of the film by Federico Fellini seems to disappear, in part for the effect of the watercolour and in part for the folding of the paper. The work is like a memory that with time disappears, in contrast with the word “amarcord” that in Romagnolo dialect means “I remember”.

Music plays an important role in the work of Jorge Macchi. In “Waking Hours” the interactive installation realised in collaboration with Edgardo Rudnitzky, each of the five record players is placed in a different room of the exhibition space. The work exists only in virtue of the presence of the visitor: with the passing of the visitor the record player turns on and makes the sound of a single instrument of an orchestra. This mechanism makes it practically impossible for all the instruments to play over each other and make a tune.

Macchi is interested in the recreation of a parallel reality and his work is an elegy in honor of the absence of a single vision of the world. The encounter between objects and materials produces new interpretations of everyday life in the artist’s work. “Scarface” is a series of detailed photographs of Buenos Aires street billboards. The faces that appear in each photo see their identity altered by the deficiencies in the gluing of the different fragments of the poster. Piano strings of two different thicknesses trace the map of an area of Buenos Aires in “The city inside”. The sculpture comes from a three-dimensional impression of an ideal A3 sheet folded into three parts, as if it were the visual and ephemeral translation of a topographic map. The vision of the city is both unitary and fragmented at the same time.

“Suspension Points” is a diptych that stages the decomposition of the image of a Tuscan building from the points of offset printing. The same number of dots that make up the first image appear in the second module distributed along the edges of the paper, as if an explosion has occurred. As punctuation marks within the writing system, ellipses are deceptive. Not only do they establish a rhythmic pattern in the flow of what we read but they also involve subtraction. They suggest a continuity of something that is not there, something that we must infer. These absences, deviations and modulations are part of the substance with which Jorge Macchi creates his works.