May 04 November, 2019
Av. Don Pedro de Mendoza 1555, La Boca (MUNAR), Buenos Aires
ARTIST: Gonzalo Maggi
Curated by Charly Herrera
DON’T WAKE THE CITY (Gallery text)
Opening and closing the windows, just the same as the wind does: lately you’ve
been forgetting everything on the table. You believe you are not drinking enough
water, the warmth of a less potable planet drags you. You love the remains of a
breakfast among clusters of cut hair and shiny cd roms.
Maybe when the piece is born, the anecdote dies, but the actions of the bodies
remain. In Gonzalo Maggi’s pieces these actions are the ones that seem to orchestrate with
haze everything that can be seen, as a caryatid, these greek statues that decorate
the facades of some buildings and seem to hold them.
Almost always I think of big things expressions through nearness, usual or small, for
example an alarm or fruits. But I find it hard to do the opposite, maybe out of some
kind of shyness. That’s where I find the beauty in Maggi’s pieces, I think they don’t
make a fuss about size of things. They are, at the same time, artificial and natural,
because they emerge from what is most natural, that is, a desire.
They are composed of few elements -person, situation, scenery- that in their
meeting, in the meaning of reconciliation, open up for us a space so broad like the
one they show. Overcoming their theatricality so that we can see them, hear them
or even move inside of them since they are presented just resting, like projected by
the light of a garden.
What can be seen and where did everybody go? Something gets closer from the
start. Something comes from an end. Not everything is that rare or different but the
landscape is something else. The solid forces vanish into a very secret intimacy,
valuable and unreal. The air merges to the air and, like mountains close to the edge
of an avalanche, small gestures prevail so as not to wake the city, that deep down, is
huge.
Valeria Lopez Muñoz