By
Abella, Mercedes
PHOTOGRAPHY AS A CONSTRUCTION OF ARCHITECTURAL SENSE
Gonzalo Maggi, in his photography, provides entity to a space that, although occupied, emanates a certain feeling of emptiness. By introducing a subject, an individual but metonymic form of existence, he gives architecture a meaning that exceeds its own ontology.
November 12, 2021
The prominence of geometry and the brutalist qualities of the built environment reflect a coldness that Maggi fights with the human body; the body as a sign of life, a sign of shelter that is actually framed. This narration presented by the photographer and of which he is alien but creator of, raises a compositional equation where architecture is context and transcendence.
Enlarge image
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Sin título, 2020 - Fotografía impresa en papel de algodón enmarcada sin vidrio con varilla de madera. - 40 x 59 cm
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Sin título - Fotografía impresa en papel de algodón enmarcada sin vidrio con varilla de madera. - 40 x 59 cm - 2020
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Sin título - Fotografía impresa en papel de algodón enmarcada sin vidrio con varilla de madera. - 105 x 70 cm
This fiction that he constructs, a microcosmic reflection, is truly documentary of a type of existence that is necessarily complemented. Maggi takes us to those spaces but does not let us enter, we can only admit its existence and watch as someone else occupies it.
In this restricted access, the artist poses the matter of scales that is not two-dimensional. In other words, through these photographs we can not only see but feel the weight of the architectural circumstances; the pressure it exerts on the essential fragility of the urban fact. With reference to the modes of sociability, and the passive or active character of the subjects in the photographs, the materiality of reinforced concrete as an omnipresent motif transmits its immanent traction and compression reactions.
"The place summons me" explains Maggi, suggesting a passivity in the face of these architectures’ monumentality. Playing with the formats of portrait, document and narrative potential, the artist develops different ways of conceiving distance, gravity, omniscience.
Gonzalo Maggi was born in Buenos Aires in 1984. He trained as a film director at the University of Cinema, completed the Artists Program at the Torcuato Di Tella University (2013) and the FNA CONTI Scholarship (2014). He has also participated in workshops and artwork clinics with Gabriel Valansi, Alberto Goldenstein, Hernán Marina and Juan Travnik.
His works were exhibited in museums (MACRO, Museo Emilio Caraffa, MAC, Museo de Bellas Artes Evita, Palais de Glace and MACLA), galleries (Aldo de Sousa, Carla Rey, Arte x Arte, Bisagra Arte Contemporáneo, Pasto) and foundations and cultural centers (Centro Cultural Rojas, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Fundación Lebenshon).
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