Uruguay

For the Uruguay Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale Marco Maggi presents Global Myopia II (Pencil & Paper), a site-specific installation of paper, stickers and pencils on the inside of the pavilion, and a large floating sculpture on the outside, curated by Patricia Bentancur.

Marco Maggi‘s abstract language refers to the way information is processed in a global era, and his work challenges the notion of drawing itself.
Paper and pencil, the two basic elements of drawing, get separated and the act of drawing is split into two stages. A portable kit composed of 10,000 elements cut out of self-adhesive paper becomes an alphabet that the artist will fold and paste onto the walls during the three months preceding the biennale. The colonies of paper on the walls enter in dialogue with a custom lighting track provided by Erco. Myriads of high-definition shadows and infinitesimal incandescent projections will aim to slow down the viewer. The only ambition of the project is to promote pauses and closeness.

The title Global Myopia II refers to an alternative concept of myopia, the artist claims and prescribes myopia as the extraordinary ability to see from very close. Nearsightedness allows one to focus carefully on invisible details, it challenges the acceleration and the abuse of long-distance relationships characteristic of our era.

Marco Maggi (1957, Montevideo) is a New York and Uruguay based artist. Maggi’s drawings, sculptures and installations encode the world. Composed of linear patterns that suggest circuit boards, aerial views of impossible cities, genetic engineering or nervous systems, his drawings are a thesaurus of the infinitesimal and the undecipherable. Maggi’s work is included in the public collections of Museum of Modern Art (New York), Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Houston, TX), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (CA), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington DC), Chicago Art Institut (Chicago, ILL), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporay Art (Los Angeles, CA),Daros Foundation (Zurich, Switzerland), among others.