Midtown Manhattan, earlier this year. The Argentine painter Fabian Marcaccio waits in his studio with a friendly smile. He wears a colorful striped sweater, and holds a cup of coffee in one hand. Visiting a studio is a special honor. Upon entering the epicenter of creativity one witnesses what "work-in-progress" really means. This is especially intriguing in the case of Fabian Marcaccio, since he deals intensively - if not to say, obsessively - with time processes and their consequences.
Between Painting and Sculpture
Marcaccio is this year’s recipient of the Bernhard-Heiliger-Award for Sculpture, a prize bestowed by the German foundation of the same name that honors the legacy of one of that country’s most important and influential sculptors, Bernhard Heiliger. On the occasion of Marcaccio’s decoration, the Georg Kolbe Museum Berlin currently shows a single exhibit of Marcaccio’s work since 2005, entitled “The Structural Canvas Paintants” and featuring what can be considered the climax of the artist's consequent exegesis of the panel into the three-dimensionality.
On the sunny studio’s floor, a square cloth is spread out, non-identifiable silicon constructs dispersed all over it. You have to watch where you step your feet. The walls are covered with Marcaccio’s latest “paintants”, large-sized excesses of form and color in various phases of progress. One is them is only about to emerge. So far, it consists of nothing but a grid knitted from rugged ropes; Marcaccio’s idea of a canvas. In easy-pose, his assistant is squatting in front of it as she distributes blue paint across the wide-meshed squares on the lower right edge. “Nice blue,” Marcaccio comments before he turns around and explains: “By knitting our canvas ourselves, we question every step of our art, so the painting becomes something like the exaggeration of a normal painting.”
Marcaccio: The Hybrid as Synthesis
Everything Fabian Marcaccio does is exaggeration. But it’s not the effect he is after. He wants to test. He asks, “What is painting?” For over twenty years now, he has been exploring and analyzing the essence of painting, and its capacities. To this end, he constantly challenges painting, pushes its borders, morphs it: the term “paintant” is a composition of the words “painting” and “mutant.” The hybrid as synthesis.
Fabian Marcaccio’s work emerges from the conflict-laden intersection between painting, photography and sculpture. Typography, digital animation and architecture have also left their traces in his multi-faceted, often hyper- dimensioned “action paintings for the observer,” to use Marcaccio’s own words. While, in the Nineties, his art would foremost lead a hermeneutic, formal discourse with itself, its focus has now shifted toward a frequent discussion of sociopolitical and linguistic realities. Its imagery is rich and expansive; it digs its claws deep into the free spaces between the ropes as if trying to gain more foothold while it simultaneously stretches away from the canvas. Fabian Marcaccio is a painter who, by questioning his art over and over again, has arrived in a three-dimensional context. Still, receiving the Bernhard- Heiliger-Award, endowed with 15,000 Euros, was a big surprise to him, he says and adds, “But what is so fascinating about the prize is that it is not primarily about rethinking a sculptor as a sculptor, but about redefining the art of sculpture itself.”
Challenging Painting
Previous laureates included Bertrand Lavier, Fritz Schwegler and Antony Gormley; the award ceremony for Marcaccio took place in September, in Berlin. In its wake the local Georg Kolbe Museum has launched an exhibition dedicated to Marcaccio’s “structural canvas paintants,” his most recent analytical thrusts into the nature of painting: figurative, structural surfaces that can hold themselves in the space although they are flat and open. “The surface of the painting erects itself and takes on a spatial form. But that form is hollow, it is a skin performing as sculpture.”
Ultimately, Marcaccio’s indefatigable search for new definitions and possibilities is prompted by his fascination for continuity, so intrinsically a keyword for his work and so pivotal for his concept of time – albeit he admits to not knowing what continuity actually is. What we don’t own ourselves is what most challenges our curiosity, he finds, “On a personal level, I have to recompose myself over and over again.”
Collage Or Continuity?
Following his studies of Philosophy in his native city of Rosario, in Argentina, Fabian Marcaccio moved to New York in 1990, where he still lives and works. His father is Italian, his wife Jewish, and most of his exhibitions take place in Europe. “I am a collage,” says Marcaccio, and the longer one talks with him, the more evident it becomes that he understands collage and continuity as two diametrically opposed terms. Only continuity enables us to explore our realities. The collage lacks this ability.
Continuity is incredibly complex; it is both synchronic and diachronic. As time passes, endless things happen simultaneously, in innumerous different spaces. Waywardness is lurking everywhere, yet the artist Marcaccio does not shy away. He rejects the “ready-made” because it is predictable. “I try to integrate. I feel quite comfortable in the complexity.” Maybe his exaggerations, along with his analytical experiments, can best be interpreted as repetitive approaches toward the character of continuity – always minding the implicated risks.
“It is very difficult to fully embrace complexity, because in order to do so, you inevitably have to accept a schizophrenic vector.” While his paintants, which often appear brutal and so indifferent towards beauty, certainly echoe this statement, the man standing in his bright studio and wearing a colored striped sweater does not. Marcaccio comes across as grounded and serene. Also, he can’t be bothered about fashion waves and has developed a solid attitude of self-sufficiency against the excitement of auctioneers and other carnival barkers. He is the genuine source of his creativity, which is enduring and constant – continuous, if you like.
Challenging Reality
With the years, his work has become more political. For Marcaccio, to engage with time’s flow means to confront its social and historical manifestations. “In the early Nineties, I was focusing more on materials. Now, I deal more with ideologies. Today, I would describe my art as something like a zone of ideological redefinition.”
He challenges realities by challenging materials. He wants to provoke and locate resistance. He needs to know what he can believe in. Why is an information that’s found on the internet and is open to anyone considered true, and how can something that appears reliable turn out to be false? Questions like these cause him to choose resilient, bendable materials. How far can he go? Fabian Marcaccio is testing, and counting.
Julia Knobloch - An established non-fiction writer and TV documentary filmmaker from Germany, I now live and work in New York. I have covered international ...
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