artnexus #57

Jorge Macchi (Buenos Aires, 1963) did his initial art studies in his native city, but since the early 1990s, thanks to a variety of fellowships, he has lived in France, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin. Perhaps this long itinerancy has made him value certain symbols contained in a memory, apparently forgotten, and on the other hand, take advantage of the most varied of materials.

In his work, Macchi seeks to salvage the value of that which seems lost in the mundane banality that surrounds us. Hence his use of everyday, humble elements, refuse on which he trains his attention and transforms into suggestive references, and his works are triggers of thought, of situations, open to interpretation. When Macchi approaches, for instance, a subject as present in contemporary society as the subject of violence, he does it without making the center of attention be a blood-soaked event, but his amazement in the face of that violence that is our penchant for forgetting, for acquiring information only in appearance, because at the turn of the page we leave those events in the past.

This is why he treasures, in his own words, “the margins, the police-blotter news, and the phrases that so pretentiously illustrate such horrific scenes, out-of-context words, love messages lost inside a newspaper, advertisements, obituaries, the names that appear after THE END in a movie, texts nobody reads”.1Texts that, recontextualized, become a subtle weaving and induce new, suggestive readings.

1.http://www.talingo.com/macchi.html

 

IVONNE PINI