Josée Bienvenu Gallery is pleased to present Marco Maggi’s sixth solo exhibition in New York, PARKING ANY TIME, “because expanding the time of perception is expanding the perception of time”. Maggi’s abstract language refers to the way information is processed in a global and yet myopic era. He favors generic formats and materials such as, standard letter size paper and envelopes, sheets of graphite or Plexiglas, to Reynold’s aluminum foil, and surveillance mirrors. The surface of each material is examined with surgical precision via a pencil or an X-acto knife and is excised for evidence. Composed of linear patterns that may suggest circuit boards, aerial views of impossible cities, genetic engineering or nervous systems, Maggi’s drawings and sculptures encode the world. The exhibition includes seventeen or seven hundred new works.

Global Myopia (Parking Mirror) is a drawing on a 36 inch outdoor convex surveillance mirror. The thousands of X-Acto Knife cuts are reflected and duplicated by the mirror: the drawing and the reflected landscape become out of focus as every incised line is cloned by the mirror. “We are setting up a society of dysfunctional information: reality becomes illegible and visual arts, invisible. Drawing demands complying with one road sign only: STOP. Speed is tragic in cars and arts. We must park now.”(Marco Maggi).

The exhibition also includes four large-scale compositions made of overlapping envelopes. Multiple incisions on the surface of the white envelopes reveal bits of colored paper underneath, reading as hints of an emerging language or remains of a forgotten alphabet. The signs evoke punctuations marks or vanished monuments, 500 envelopes containing no message.

Color-Braille is a new series developed from the idea of “blind slides”. Cuts on colored paper, held in 35 mm slide mounts, reveal layers of information at the threshold between two and three dimensions. In Vertical Carousel, 80 drawings on aluminum foil in slide mounts inhabit a now-obsolete Kodak Carousel. Only the drawing on the first slide is partially visible. The carousel hangs on the wall like a mounted head of inaccessible information. On the opposite wall, Drawings from 1998 to 2000, a pair of the artist’s eyeglass lenses, taken out of their frames and carefully drawn upon with an X-acto blade, project their diffracted shadows onto a stand. The project room is a wunderkammer of drawings: graphite on graphite, graphite on clay-board, cuts on Plexiglas, drypoint on aluminum foil.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Marco Maggi lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America since 1998, in galleries, museums, and biennials. Concurrently with his New York exhibition, his work will be shown at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami Beach. Upcoming projects also include solo shows at The Lubin House (of Syracuse University) in New York City, (Fall 2010); The Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, NY and Vassar College Museum, Poughkeepsie, NY (2011-2012). Recent exhibitions include: Works from the Daros Latinamerica Collection, Fundacíon Banco Santander, Madrid, Spain (2010), XVII Biennial Arte Paiz, Guatemala City (2010); American Ream, Syracuse University, NY (2009); Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions, MOCA, Los Angeles, CA (2009); New Perspectives in Latin American Art, 1930-2006: Selections from a Decade of Acquisitions, MoMA, New York, NY (2008). His work is included in numerous collections including: MoMA, New York, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Drawing Center, New York, NY; Morgan Library, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; The Daros Collection, Zurich, Switzerland.