MAURO GIACONI

RE-TURN

Dic 1, 2014  |  Feb 13, 2015

Dot Fiftyone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Mauro Giaconi, marking the artist's third solo presentation with the gallery.


From December 1, 2014, Mauro Giaconi will exhibit “Revolt"; a series of moving sculptures based on the ephemeral site-specific mural “Volver a Girar” done at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico in May 2013. By deconstructing the mural and wall fragments detached from its walls, Giaconi launches a poetic exploration on detachment, fragility, rupture and social breakdown. By accepting the possibility of loss, of an end, Giaconi provokes a spatial reconfiguration of the memory of a static image. Its traces are then used to evoke past events and erect upon its ruins a dreamlike environment, which by stirring the past builds a future, in order to turn again.





As part of the exhibit, he will be showing his new video Linea Transversal,(Transversal Line), in the video-room and a collection of recent drawing in the project room.

In 2013, during the exhibition of “Panorámica. Paisajes [Overview: Landscapes] 1969-2013” at Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mauro Giaconi had an outstanding participation with an ephemeral intervention on some of its walls. Under the title Volver a girar[To Turn Around Once Again], he showed a monumental work made with graphite, a sander, a kneaded eraser, and cleaning products. The drawing was recovering the landscape of the historic city center surrounding the Palacio de Bellas Artes building, among other abstract shapes and erasures with which Giaconi often builds spaces. The overlaying of elements in his drawing makes constant allusions to the idea of ruins, and the extent of the disorder implicit in them — in the debris of buildings — also brings about a dislocation of time. In Volver a girar[To Turn Around Once Again], one of the most outstanding elements was the building dome, which was shown still under construction. However, the ambiance was definitely different from the one in Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century (when the original picture had been taken): The place is overrun with water and affected by other natural phenomena, which transports the viewer to a would-be future. Born in Argentina, Giaconi appropriated for himself a fragment of Mexico City, as he has taken possession of other sites in different regions of the world, such as the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City, or the burning of books during the dictatorships in Chile and Uruguay.

InRevuelta[Re-turn], the work this exhibition is named after, Mauro Giaconi recovers the prop on which he made Volver a girar[To Turn Around Once Again], belying the inevitable fate of a plaster layer in order to make another kinetic drawing. The fragmentation of the original image, its random arrangement in the moving structures, and the rhythm of the hypnotic twirling of the pieces do not allow the viewer to identify its allusions. The figurative images from the original work have disappeared — only the purpose of Revuelta[Re-turn], i.e., the reconstruction of the material, remains. The dichotomy between construction and deconstruction is present on an ongoing basis in the author’s creative process, starting with the materials he uses: Graphite is the key raw material in his works; however, the kneaded eraser, for the purpose of effacing some of his strokes, is as important.

His professional training as an architect is evident: In his works, the lines, as architectural elements, have a special weight; even though most of the times he cuts them short, one feels as if they have an unguarded density, a decisive, unavoidable breakdown.


Giaconi literally pushes drawing towards other possibilities; he uses its formal elements as a tool in order to build and tear down; it looks as if he is refusing to surrender to architecture’s quality of permanence, as well as to the formal boundaries of the drawing.

He made his video, Cross-sectional Line, inspired by the book Memorias del calabozo [Memoirs from the Dungeon] and apropos of a violent present, which is his own, and about which he has something to say, in this case from a hopeful point of view. The book, written by Mauricio Rosencof and Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro (in which two political prisoners, during the Uruguayan dictatorship, find a way to emotionally survive, using an improvised Morse code, tapping through the wall that separates their cells), is the source for this videotaped action, in which the graphite pencils are continuously being nailed to a wall until they succeed in piercing it. Giaconi manages to produce a simple, poetic, extremely intense language in order to break the wall’s silence — a symbol of an overwhelming circumstance. Through a harmonious tapping, we witness another unexpected possibility of the graphite pencil: for Mauro Giaconi, that material beginning of the drawing becomes a fundamental part of his line of research, and it is this what makes him expand its uses and reinvent it, even with its own destruction, if need be.

Itzel Vargas Plata