curated by Daniela Palazzoli

Where is the path?

Your make your own path as you walk. 

With the exhibition BEYOND THE CHAOS between intelligence and beauty, Osart Gallery presents Annabel Daou, a Lebanese-American born in Beirut (b. 1967) and Marco Maggi, a Uruguayan citizen with Italian origins, (b. Montevideo, 1957). As citizens of the world, who habitually live and work in different countries, and on more than one continent, their propensity for a nomadic and non-touristic reality has fine tuned their artistic sensitivity to the substantial upheaval and endless ramifications of globalization. Their creativity has been pushed in new directions, and tends to speak out against some of the perversions – but also to emphasize the promises of harmony and beauty – implicit in our present. This approach, defined by their individual visions, makes Daou and Maggi pioneers in the exploration and creative communication of situations which are neither published, nor studied in terms of the effects the power, stability and control as they are imposed by protagonists of the new social order. Given that every one of us is in some way subjected to these pressures, an astute observation of the implications of the present-future – which is already unravelling before us, but is not yet clearly perceived – make these hints at the awareness of strategies in the making, as well as their antidotes, not only fascinating, but extremely useful.

Marco Maggi is obsessed with the tactics adopted by the mass-media industry during the last decades – especially those communication strategies used to sedate and contain our emotive reactions to dramatic sequences of events, to which we are exposed on a daily basis. The media has discovered that massive doses of fast and furious interpretation are an incredibly efficient means of censoring and silencing the press and thereby anaesthetize us to real events, which as a result seem less disturbing or interesting. In part, this is one of the motivations for both artists’ rediscovery of the discipline of drawing, in new contexts and with new styles, however, they no longer view this technique as a private, almost secret, design that precedes the realization of greater works, as was the case in the past. In the increasingly vast panorama of media to which artists have access, drawing has become a light and ductile vehicle, with which artists can fully express their vision – rapidly and with great impact – without overworking or exaggerating. Maggi’s works are the product of his renowned indecipherable sacred writings: composed of two- and three-dimensional, miniscule, stratified markings inscribed in industrial materials and objects of everyday use, from which the artist’s vision and sensitive hand extract sensations and unexpected subtleties. The viewer becomes aware of this trait as soon as he enters the gallery, finding an installation composed of ninety-eight reams of standard A4 paper titled Hotbed 2011 (Blue, Red and Yellow shadows), emerging from the floor. This installation is one of his Hotbeds, a term indicating the strategic role of this paper platform in the diffusion of a contagion which goes on to involve other works in the exhibition. In Hotbed 2011 (Blue, Red, and Yellow Shadows) the upper level is scattered with small cuts, around which the paper lifts to form tiny, three-dimensional excrescences. The filaments rise from the paper mound and, with playful delicacy, stimulate an awareness of the potential tactile pleasure of this everyday paper, while simultaneously embellising the surface with an unexpected myriad of coloured shadows. This incitement to linger and explore the forms encountered is precisely that which Maggi desires. It is with this action that the antidote – and raison d’être of his work – takes effect, in the moment that these forms and attractive sensations “have the scope of training our empathy for the indecipherable”. The attention dedicated to discovering and interpreting these surprises, wakes us from our mass-media induced slumber. And thus, from everyday industrial materials – which the artist digs out through his exploration of stores like Wallmart – which conceal secret qualities, new works are born. Here we see Aluminum, a sheet of aluminium from which orchestrated signs draw flashes from an animated, reflective graphic, emphasized by tiny slide frames, extracted by Maggi from the oblivion of objects no longer in use, in order to offer us yet another coup de théâtre that plays on subtle tones that sound somewhere between irony and minimalism. Drop and Plexi Line take advantage of the characteristics of Plexiglas, and in particular its optimal transparency that is maintained even when combined in three-dimensional forms. With Global Myopia, Maggi elegantly sabotages a convex mirror, which allows us to view images from a wide-angle perspective while rendering it “short-sighted” in the artist’s take on global vision. Complete Coverage on Fontana reveals another important aspect of Maggi’s artistic strategy: that of the objective equalization to found at the source of mass-media and artistic communication. This ‘Fontana piece’ was created as part of a series for which Maggi drew inspiration from masterpieces – amongst which a work by Fontana – of the collection belonging to Ted Turner, the creator of CNN. Playing on the dual meaning associated with the word ‘cover’ – which in journalistic slang defines ‘cover’ as ‘recounting an event’, while in another sense the word can mean ‘to hide’ – Maggi plays hide-and-seek with Fontana’s cuts, intervening with his own slashes. These miniature, aggressive gestures remind us that “The main goal of dysfunctional information is to withhold again and again reality behind the scene”. On the rear of work one discovers the true nature of Maggi’s cuts which illustrating how, by using art, we can at times turn over the cards in order remind ourselves of the difference between what the instruments of mass-media tell us and the real nature of things.

On the other hand, Annabel Daou often alludes to ‘Chaos’ – also the title of one of her works on exhibition – that she symbolically identifies with experiences and images associated with the building of the Tower of Babel. The construction of this tower marked the moment in which human beings lost their understanding of a sacred communion constituted by a single tongue, while the formation of other languages made them incapable of communicating with others, and from this point, the spaces for misinterpretation, created by the separation of the tongues, came into being. Simultaneously, in the multiplication of the languages one finds a concept which encompasses a more limited and precise significance – the self-same element that presides over the formation of national states. Daou is conscious of the fact that this is not a concluded process, but rather that the contrary is true. As a result of the effects of globalisation and wide-spread migrations, which are in turn a contributing factor, today we find ourselves in an contrasting situation: languages continually attempt to diminish themselves and return – if slowly and with great difficulty – to a single tongue capable of accelerating the processes of interdependence and the global assimilation of peoples and nations. Annabel Daou is well aware of the duality implied by this long process leading towards the future, tenaciously registering the doubts and emotions that arise during her hesitant growth as a Lebanese woman – born in Beirut where she lived throughout the violent civil war (she often recalls that “there were no shelters in Beirut”) – in her emancipation from the past. An example of this can be seen in her works dedicated to the theme of ‘Babel’, in which Daou declines this name in English, signalling that ‘bab el’ pronounced in Arabic sounds as “door to”. When she writes ‘door to’ (instead of Babel), we read an English phrase written in phonetic Arabic that tells us nothing, and the beginnings of a process of written inter-cultural and international exchange are immediately stunted. Memory Hole is part of a series in which she wanted to write, but avoid any resemblance to concrete poetry. In order to do this, every time she wrote a line she would then move the sheet, turning the paper in such a way as to change the form and in so doing create a “memory hole” which obscures that which is not immediately visible. In War torn, which signifies “destroyed by war”, the creases in the paper simultaneously define and hide the word “war” through the confusion of the script of “chaos” and the shadows created by the folds in the paper sheet. Jalousie (Jealousy) refers to an attempt at reading between the lines in order to understand the indecipherable, while also referring to the anxiety provoked by jealousy, and the tantalite contortions of those who suffer because they cannot see clearly, even when they attempt to control the events at their source. In You killed me, Daou paid special attention to the composition of the fragments of paper and especially the spaces between the ripped and re-composed shreds of paper; from the moment in which the black lines separating the white lines evoke in her not only the sense of the distance between the artist and the paper, but also the spaces that divide people. To conclusion, in the Repaired landscapes – those landscapes in which destruction is a substantial part of the construction process – this term also evokes the idea of a refuge or shelter, and represents a point of reference onto which the artist holds in order to find direction, as well as a support in the tiring creative act of continually putting things back together: thus identifying new paths toward new, positive global dialogues.