MARCO MAGGI: GLOBAL MYOPIA (PENCIL & PAPER)

The Uruguayan Pavilion is one of the 29 national pavilions located in the Giardini della Biennale. La Biennale Arte 2015 is directed by Okwui Enwezor, curator, art critic and writer, and the director of the Haus der Kunst, Munich. The Uruguayan Commissioner is artist Ricardo Pascale and the project is curated by Patricia Bentancur, Senior Curator and New Media Director at the Centro Cultural de España in Montevideo (CCE) a leading space for Iberoamerican art.

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 will present Global Myopia (pencil & paper), a site-specific installation of paper, stickers and pencils.

Global Myopia (pencil & paper)

The challenge was to conceive a project that could travel in a carry-on suitcase and unfold on the walls like a .zip file, a portable infinite able to expand slowly during months prior to the inauguration. The diminutive papers are disseminated or connected following the specific traffic rules and syntax dictated by any accumulation of sediments. A paper skin with no letters, or handwriting, free from messages, displayed slowly, according to no previous plan, on the walls of the Uruguayan pavilion. The colonies of paper sticker 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 project divides the act of drawing in two stages. First, by cutting an alphabet of 10,000 elements during the course of 2014 in New York, and second by using the precut elements to write on the pavilion walls during the Spring of 2015. In the same way, the project separates the two key elements of drawing, pencil and paper, into two spaces—paper drawings in the main space and an installation of pencils in the first room.

Drawing Machine (nine possible starting points) are nine pencils sent to penitence. The parallel black pencils pointing against the wall are suspended in the air by the tension of nine archery cords. With the instability of a seismograph, the work attempts to document the options available at the outset of a drawing.

In conclusion, the only subject of Global Myopia is drawing.