hipo real
The well-known Uruguayan artist, who lives in NYC, Marco Maggi (Montevideu, 1957) presents his solo exhibiiton at Galeria Nara Roesler, the new installation Hipo Real, the unfolding of the series The Turner Collection, developed since 2005. In this series, Maggi, who has participated at the 25th São Paulo International Biennial, and at the 3rd and 4th editions of the Mercosul Biennial, once again exposes the confrontation between the excessive velocity present in contemporary society and human temporality.
“Slow down, demands Maggi. The game he proposes is filled with great secrets and revealing strategies. It is necessary to look with time”, writes art critic Adriano Pedrosa about the exhibition. He makes us remember how subjective is the experience of looking and interpreting, explains one of the several international articles about his work. According to Pedrosa, slowing down is anti-modern, anti-progressive, anti-capitalist, anit-urban and anti-globalization. “As a contemporary Faust, the artist seems to tell us: ‘Stop, an instant that passes’”.
His wonderful, precise and delicate drawings that, according to Maggi, have the paper as purpose and time and focus as preferred means, are made with the most prosaic materials: incision on piles of paper or on acrylic, grafitte on paper or on the passe partout of the frame itself, dry point on aluminum framed on slides, amongst others.
The installation Hipo Real is composed of 15 acrylic boxes spread around the floor and of 8 paper panels distributed on the walls, on which Maggi appropriates reproductions of artists’ works such as Warhol, Klein, Fontana, Richter and of important names of the Latin American art scene, such as Jesus Soto, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel and Lygia Pape.
“Hipo Real is the opposite of the exageration, of hyper-realisam, it is a second underlying reality, a surface unnoticeable to be read without the hope to be informed”, says Maggi. According to Adriano Pedrosa, he flips the image for the viewer, adds a pile of paper to it and then makes cuts on its surface, “creating small reliefs on paper, revealing here and there, filaments and fragments of hidden masterpieces”.
Six more drawings complete the exhibition, in which the reference to velocity is further underlined in Slow Foil, Slow Shadow, and Sliding (remitting to slides, whose frames are used in the works), besides the installation with aluminum foil packages.
The video Micro & Soft on Macintosh Apple, presented at Galeria Nara Roesler during the show Leveza e Aspereza da Linha in the beginning of 2008, and curated by Agnaldo Farias, is on permanent display at MoMA, in New York City. The work of the artist has been shown extensively in the USA, Europe and Latin America, since 1998. Amongst the recent exhibitions are: Poetics of the Handmade, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, EUA (2007); Doubtful Strait, TEOR/éTica Foundation, San José and Alajuela, Costa Rica (2006); Gyroscope, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, EUA (2006); Drawing from the Modern 1975-2005, MoMA, New York ( 2005), The Fifth Gwangju Biennial, Korea (2004); The San Juan Triennial, Puerto Rico (2004); VIII Bienal de Havana, Cuba (2003), besides the 25th São Paulo Biennial (2002). The works of Maggi belong to important public and private art collections, such as: MoMA, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Daros Collection, Zurich, Suíça; Patricia Phelps De Cisneros Collection, New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC.
