Marco Maggi: No visual distancing please...

Slow swarm

Marco Maggi has called his new exhibition No visual distancing please…, a directive that would have made little sense just a year ago. Although it speaks directly to our current circumstances, its premise comes as no surprise to those familiar with Maggi’s art. In March 2020, he explained, “For decades I have been living immersed in my own studio quarantine.”[i]

In the last year we have been developing through necessity the skills that Maggi would have had us cultivate in art. In his intricately cut, adhered, incised, and drawn works he has created expanses for looking slowly, to decelerate our racing perception. Instead of the sweeping scan, he proposes the approach of the page – coming close as if to read, then instead meandering over a surface that lightly draws itself up, casting small shadows echoing the folded and projecting elements he has applied. As the medium description of some of his new works gently taps out: paper on paper on paper. 

For many years, Maggi has upheld the need for deceleration. While appreciative of the practical speed of computers and other such elements of contemporary life, he has other aims for his art:

I want to make time visible. Promoting pauses, slower and closer viewers with a myopic attitude, scanning surfaces with no hope to be informed…. Our only possible hope resides in tiny details. In order to focus on them, I propose a new approach, an objective intimacy. We need to rebuild slowness and proximity.[ii]

The nearness Maggi proposes takes on a homeopathic potential in a time when distance can mean the difference between life and death. His art offers a “radical optimism”[iii] in a time of isolation and trepidation before small things. 

Often, Maggi’s art expands into entire environments, floor to ceiling. In his last show in New York, he darkened the gallery.[iv]Visitors received hats equipped with a small light, as if to explore a cave, so that his expansively minute paper reliefs, strewn across the gallery’s walls, slipped into vision only when struck, glancingly, with light streaming from viewers’ heads. Sitting slightly above eye level, the lights could not quite align with the desired focus of vision, making for small visual displacements – if the desire to look at one area trained one’s eyesight upon it, the beam sat just above, rendering the wall a planar twilight of long shadows.

Maggi’s framed works offer themselves as more defined sites, laboratories for experiments in vision, experience, and memory. They travel when the artist does not, and they provide individual training in no visual distancing. In his exhibition at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, the two largest works hang outside the project room. The larger of the two, Binaries, addresses the smallest and most extreme of worlds—the coded language of computing, new quantum technology allowing the internet to run even faster than before, and the oppositional social distancing brought on by the tiniest of viruses. Stark in black and white, the vertical arrays suggest a downward shower of elements so diminutive they simultaneously hint at dissolution, a kind of aerosol effect. In Sliding Gold, 352 35-mm papers become a gridded series of micro-scenes. Where once a projector might have rhythmically clicked through each slide, Maggi invites us to pause and find our own pace. Spending just one second on each frame would mean 5 minutes and 52 seconds overall before the piece. In a world where the average museum visitor, according to Maggi, spends just 16 seconds before each artwork, his circuit training becomes a masterclass in slow looking, achieving a “gold medal and world record.”[v]

Likewise made in 2021, the No Visual Distancing works contain elements familiar in Maggi’s lexicon. Long, thin strands of paper rear gracefully in the angled catenary of a suspension bridge; small squares and hollowed circles project slightly, mounted to the surface by discreet tabs. Across six works, a chromatic range reaches from white-on-white to atomized particles of vivid primary hues on gray, with blue recurring. Yet the individual elements, whatever their color, now take their places in paper-on-paper drawings of a different collective character. There are gaps and lacunae, areas of paper left as a single, seemingly blank layer; while Maggi’s wall installations frequently leave vast areas of rooms untouched, vacancies within the bounds of the frame read more starkly without an architectural context. 

In hindsight, much of Maggi’s previous work has taken as given the geometric regularity of paper sheets and reams, slide passe-partouts, picture frames, and even rolls of aluminum foil. These rectangular and gridded formats contribute to associations of his art with the humanly made designs of circuit boards and cities – impressions complicated in these new works. The empty spaces are irregular, asymmetrical, suggesting the unpredictable paths of rivers, microscopic entities, and other elements of nature.