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Title:
GLOBAL MYOPIA (pencil & paper)
Artist:
Marco Maggi
* 1957 Montevideo, Uruguay. Lives in New Paltz, NY, USA, and Montevideo.
Commissioner: Ricardo Pascale
Artist, * 1947 Montevideo, Uruguay; lives there.
Curator: Patricia Bentancur
Senior Curator and New Media Director at the Centro Cultural de España in Montevideo (CCE).
Marco Maggi represents Uruguay at the 56th International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia. The Uruguayan pavilion is one of the 29 national pavilions located in the Giardini della Biennale.
Marco Maggi's drawings, sculptures and installations encode the world. Composed of linear patterns that suggest circuit boards, aerial views of impossible cities, genetic engineering or nervous systems, his drawings are a thesaurus of the infinitesimal and the undecipherable. Marco Maggi's abstract language refers to the way information is processed in a global era, and his work challenges the notion of drawing itself. For the 56th Venice Biennale he presents "GLOBAL MYOPIA (pencil & paper)", a site-specific installation of self adhesive paper and pencils.
Saying that the world is myopic sounds depreciative: a planet without perspective, moving forward without any clear sense of direction. Marco Maggi, on the contrary, claims and prescribes myopia as the extraordinary ability to see from very close. Nearsightedness allows one to focus carefully on invisible details, it challenges the acceleration and the abuse of long distance relationships characteristic of our era. After a farsighted 20th Century with solutions for everyone and forever, it is time to stimulate our empathy for the immediate and the insignificant.
In "GLOBAL MYOPIA (pencil & paper)", paper and pencil, the two basic elements of drawing, get separated and the act of drawing is split into two stages. A portable kit composed of 10,000 elements cut out of self-adhesive paper becomes an insignificant alphabet that the artist has folded and pasted onto the walls during the three months preceding the biennale. The diminutive papers are disseminated or connected following the specific traffic rules and syntax dictated by any accumulation of sediments. The colonies of paper drawings on the walls enter in dialogue with a custom lighting track provided by Erco. Myriads of high definition shadows and infinitesimal incandescent projections will aim to slow down the viewer. The only ambition of the project is to promote pauses and to make time visible.
(From press information)
Contact:
Email: press(at)marcomaggi.org
Website: marcomaggi.org
Venue:
National Pavilion of Uruguay
Giardini della Biennale
9 May - 22 November 2015