Mauro Giaconi
Dot Fiftyone, Miami
Mauro Giaconi’s universe is trussed up by a powerful secretiveness. His buildings impose their presence like enigmatic swarms, barriers, boundaries, impossibility. Tubes, scaffolds, bricks, roofs, stairs, wires, containers are appropriated as highly significant aesthetic entities: critical areas from where the artist dis- courses on concrete ontological issues such as lack of communication and fragility.
Giaconi’s proposal, endowed with great metaphorical power, forces the spectator to engage in a thorough examination in search of the human gesture behind the cold structure. Immense Parallel is the artist’s second solo show in Miami, and it constitutes a new stage in his insatiable inquiry into the urban environment. On this occasion, Giaconi focuses on a single material: the fence, that malleable metal structure which, like a wall, demarcates edges and defines a sense of property, while at the same time it excludes, segregates, and stigmatizes.
The exhibition composed of drawings in graphite and a central installation constitutes an expansive vital force from where the wire seems to burst out. Giaconi, who is an excellent draftsman, employs graphite to recreate these wire accumulations which, thanks to the emphatic use of an eraser, are bored through by light beams that dazzle and captivate us.
These two-dimensional works evince an essential spatial quality. The successive layers of wire mesh bored through by the light appear as a space − impassable − to be traversed, a challenge that defies impossibility. Some of the works still contain reminiscences of constructions that function as a sort of decoy, a clin d’oeil to the artist’s previous production. Such is the case of Anular (To Annul), 2010, a triptych in which Giaconi shows us the progressive disintegration of the architectonic structure, transformed into a skein, a doodle, a liberating expressive gesture.
The titles of the works are highly suggestive: To Stir, To Detonate,To Annul, To Demolish, To Tear, To Prune. All these works are impelled by the force of the verb that incites to action; the infinitives chosen by the artist denote the need to destroy everything with the aim of establishing a new order, a new cosmogony.
In this respect, the dialogue between the drawings and the cen- tral installation is vital. Hueco (Hollow), 2010, is composed of multiple layers of wire mesh separated from one another by an identical distance, generating as a result a perfect cube, inaccessible through any of its edges. The shining structure that glitters in its interaction with the light incites the viewer to embark on a circular tour that emphasizes the ludic kinetic feeling derived from the visual movement between the differ- ent layers. Pliers in hand, Giaconi has bored holes in each layer in search of a way out, a liberating tunnel that, oddly enough, is trapped in the structure itself.
In the central exhibition space, Palimpsest, 2010, dominates the scene through the beauty of the trace and the sophisticated nature of the resulting harmonious composition. The exquisite large format drawing maintains the same abstract vocation that animates the rest of the show. The superposition of the motif − in cathartic obsession − ends up by eliminating the referent it emulates via areas of light and shadows, slight distortions of perspective, small out-of-focus areas that force the viewer to adopt a constant repositioning in front of the painting.
