Obituario

Jorge Macchi has stated that in his work he aims to use the minimum displacement of everyday objects to create a new perception of the world around us. His dramatic perception of chance and fate - the uncontrollable - is at the base of his formally controlled constructions. In Obituario the obituaries page of a daily newspaper has been altered: all the text on the page has been removed. This intervention displaces the memento of death to construct a new object, a grid made of empty cells, a skeleton that obliquely brings us back to the idea of absence evoked by death. As in most of Macchi's work, Obituario achieves its conceptual impact by extracting poetic depth from an ordinary object by means of a dry, economical aesthetic.

The employment of newspaper cut outs has marked one strand of Macchi's production since the mid 1990s and continues to this day. This fragile paper grid, hanging from a small nail on the wall like a soft sculpture, forms a series alongside other similar works, like his Love Story, and the more recent The Transparent Enigma of 2004. In other cases, the artist employs cut out words from newspapers, combining them in a new textual configuration or even creating a musical score, as in his installation Incidental Music, presented for the first time at the Art Exchange, University of Essex in 1997.
Gabriela Salgado