artnexus #75

A number of contemporary artists have used drawing as a resource, exploring the diversity, variety, and richness of the medium. Marco Maggi (Uruguay, 1957, lives and works in New York and Montevideo) has played an important role in that exploration. Maggi has worked in very diverse media, creating everything from small-scale drawings to installations that occupy significant spaces, but always demonstrating a constant concern: how is the relationship between audience and artwork established. A sizable sector of the art public, bombarded as it is by contemporary images, approaches the image proposed in a quick-cut fashion, seeking to register it almost instantly. Maggi’s work wants to promote a slower-paced attitude. His works in fine lines that build intricate models with references to architecture, the landscape, maps, in a meticulous construction dominated by geometry, prompt us to observe the detail. Thus the closeness required from the viewer to understand the micro-universe built by Maggi; thus the need to go slow, observing in order to discover the complexity of the construction. It is as if this exercise of stopping to see were a way of resisting, from the field of art, the speed of the contemporary. In a world overloaded with symbols we can’t understand, we are, Maggi says, “[…]damned to know more and understand less. And this is not a contradictory process, it is a semiotic indigestion.” His complex drawings don’t have specific meanings, they are open texts for readers who are equally open. 
IVONNE PINI