Jorge Macchi

The Argentine artist Jorge Macchi’s sixth exhibition here, “Suspension Points,” presents nearly thirty installations, paintings, and sound pieces. Most are shown for the first time, and all are harmonizers of addition and subtraction, presence and void. As the show’s title hints, the works evoke the paradox of an ellipsis inserted between words (silence, omission), delighting in a perceptual buffering powered by playful, rigorous tensions that belie simple forms.

The diptych Suspension points 03, 2018, an acrylic on paper, depicts, on one panel, the image of an Italian building defined by the typical punctiform weave of four-color printing. The other panel portrays the abstract dispersion of its counterpart. Elsewhere, theoretical premises concretize in polyhedrons, devised with steel rods, that unfold until they elude all geometric reference (“Present,” 2018); in history books that sprout wooden scaffold-shadows (“Vanitas,” 2018); and in the construction of a brick wall, sans mortar, that blocks a doorway (Buried and alive, 2018). Granting sound a physical presence, the installation Waking hours, 2018, a collaboration with composer Edgardo Rudnitzky, consists of seven portable record players, placed on the floor, that activate when visitors move past them, unfurling a massive sonic carpet.

For the sole work in the show that has been previously exhibited, La noche de los museos (The night of the museums), 2016, Maachi has laid on the flat seating area of the gallery’s main space (an erstwhile cinema auditorium) a large beige tapestry whose cuboid pattern is revealed only in the shadows cast by four spotlights (which are not turned on). In Macchi’s work, darkness illuminates and reveals, and absence seems to be reconfirmed by the material the artist has chosen to compose his image.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.