Fabian Marcaccio Jours Noirs

The Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery is pleased to present this new series of paintings by the artist, of Argentinean origin and working in New York, Fabian Marcaccio.

Abstraction is the starting point of the research but is not the subject of these paintings. His work is a connection, networked with the world around us.

Pioneer of digital painting, Marcaccio uses on canvas silicone - as a mixing material - synthetic materials, graphics from the computer world. The alteration of paint and bodies, in fusion in this universe of matter and images. One of the characteristics of these canvases is the idea of breath: not an aerial wind or the benefits of a zephyr but a breath of the creator who wishes to give a meaning to the world.

One finds in his paintings the famous "brush stroke" - that broad and defined brushstroke, one of the topics of Lichtenstein and American abstract expressionism of the 1950s. If this can be a legacy, the evolution of Marcaccio's work cannot be reduced to a so-called "abstract" painting. The canvas appears as a recurring theme: its weave constitutes the very substance of the work, a canvas for the construction of his paintings. They are a search for balance in a universe with unstable foundations. The artist is attached to the possible extension of the canvas and the painting by the construction of real painted environments where the material springs up and where the gesture is a driving element.

The idea behind this series of paintings is in a dialogue with the works of the great masters of post-Napoleonic painting (Géricault, Gross, Delacroix,...) Thus the work "Black Days" can be seen as a conversation with the "Raft of the Medusa". Fabian Marcaccio proposes a new series of atypical paintings, which plunges its roots in abstraction but wants to lead us towards a new form of narration. Today, when the idea of nation is questioned, Marcaccio through this work re-invents a new idea of historical painting.

Can one paint chaos, instability? Marcaccio, far from an abstraction that would only refer to itself, bears witness here. A committed art for an artist who affirms "that realities are more intense than art" (1). An art of testimony that wishes to give meaning to this chaos in order to revisit our contemporary histories.

Fabian Marcaccio was born in 1963 in Rosario de Santa Fé, Argentina. He began exhibiting at the Bronx Museum of Arts, NY in 1988. From then on he exhibited throughout the American continent, often associating himself with new currents of abstraction. The Thaddaeus Ropac gallery presents him since 1996 in Paris and Salzburg (Cat. "Face à Face" 1997).

(1) In Catalogue " Fabian Marcaccio Painting Stories ". p57. Exhibition in Stuttgart and Cologne. 2000/2001