Marco Maggi
Into Whiter Space
June 13, 2015 – April 1, 2016
SPACE, Irvine, CA
From Sayago & Pardon:
The Sayago & Pardon Collection is proud to present Into Whiter Space, a project of Abstraction in Action. Marco Maggi’s Into Whiter Space, 2015 is a site-specific installation at SPACE, Sayago & Pardon’s corporate headquarters located in Irvine, California. Into Whiter Space was produced in the context of the exhibition Monochrome Undone, currently being exhibited at SPACE.
Into Whiter Space alludes to the purist and conclusive modern idea of a uniform white painterly surface of the monochrome. The piece is proposed as a sort of textured and irregular, but delicate, skin on two large facing walls. These walls are intervened with hundreds of small white stickers cut in different shapes. The artist comments: “…around them [are] more and more stickers, like growing towns to build a big city [L.A.?] or adding letters, sentences, paragraphs, chapters to write a novel. Homeopathic process, constructing or demolishing syntax.”[1]
The artist aims not only for us to slow down, but to lose our daily sense of purpose while observing the work. Our eyes make sense of the world through the interaction of the focal and the peripheral visions. Whereas the focal allows us to focus on details and represents our conscious vision, the peripheral helps us to organize space and encompass shadow to create context. Through one pragmatic act of seeing, Marco Maggi’s Into Whiter Space can neither be apprehended in its totality, nor its many details. The complex, structured, yet unpredictable surface challenges a deliberate single-minded gaze for us to discover a freer, slower, and broader way of seeing. Maggi’s monochrome does not function as a blank purified space of order and control; instead it is paradoxically unsubordinated and it denaturalizes the conceptual neutrality associated to white. Time slows down and totality is not possible. Into Whiter Space will have a second life, as a digital platform on Abstraction in Action. The Internet will provide an intimate experience allowing the particularities of every cutout to be explored in detail while the whole still remains elusive.
[1] Marco Maggi, personal statement, 2013