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Marco Maggi at Cristinerose/Josee Bienvenu - New York
Art in America, Dec, 2003 by Matthew Guy Nichols
For his third solo exhibition in New York, Marco Maggi presented a new version of Hotbed, a sprawling installation first executed in 2000 and since shown in several different venues. As in previous incarnations, Hotbed established a general theme of communication, which was enhanced by the 17 mixed-medium drawings that lined the gallery walls.
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Unlike its more fastidious predecessors, the latest Hotbed looked like an office mishap. Thousands of sheets of white, letter-size paper carpeted the gallery floor, as though deposited by an exploding Xerox machine. In the midst of this disarray and surrounding a central column, reams of the same paper were neatly arranged in grids (though even a few of these piles had slumped to their sides). The topmost sheet of each stack bore precise incisions, and Maggi had folded those papers into freestanding flaps, slender arches and other simple shapes. As in the past, the overall impression of Hotbed was architectural. The reams of paper suggested low, anonymous office buildings, divided by intersections and surmounted by miniature monuments. Yet here, set within a sea of scattered paper, the stacked city looked ancient and ruined, which also emphasized the growing obsolescence of paper as a vehicle of communication.
Maggi's drawings likewise address the exchange of information. Working with graphite on paper or clay-covered boards, the artist creates intricate patterns with a limited vocabulary of tiny abstract shapes. Rectangular cells, gently arching lines and compressed zigzags proliferate across the supports. When these marks are consigned to only a portion of a composition, they can resemble old maps of coastal cities, like those hanging in the backgrounds of many 17th-century Dutch genre paintings. In Landmark (2003), for instance, Maggi seems to describe the congested architecture of a bustling port, its yawning harbor dotted with stray indications of seafaring commerce.
When the artist applies the same obsessive manner of drawing to other mediums, the results suggest more modern forms of communication. Using drypoint, Maggi etches his abstract designs into shiny sheets of aluminum foil, creating embossed surfaces that resemble electronic circuit boards. This association is strongest in Silver Stamp (2003), a small aluminum rectangle that projects horizontally from the wall. By moving so fluidly from cartography to circuitry, Maggi's private hieroglyphics appear to chart both the evolution and the dissemination of information.
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