Fuegos de Artificio

Situations and objects taken from everyday life provide the raw material for the production of Jorge Macchi, an artist who has been showing his drawings, collages, installations and videos internationally since the early 1990s. In his oeuvre the artist has used maps, sheet music, newspaper headlines and newspaper pages, which he appropriates and delicately manipulates during obviously simple operations. In doing so, Macchi conveys contemporary feelings and concerns. By reintroducing ordinary elements and retelling stories whose banality renders them nearly invisible, he comes up with a new perspective from which to challenge everyday life, altering the comprehension of commonplace situations and drawing them near to a kind of fiction. The title of Fuegos de artificio [Fireworks, 2002] announces what is represented on the walls: a pyrotechnic blast involving steel nails, light and shadow. What would otherwise stand for an ephemeral explosion appears in this work as permanence and immobility, as a denial of the very phenomenon that it reproduces. The fleeting matter of fireworks is frozen into the steel nails, while the moving light and colors are paralyzed by shadows. In this work, Macchi transforms illusion into presence, conducting a somewhat violent, somewhat fun exchange between fact and fantasy.