In 2016, after the relocation of the Ruth Benzacar gallery from its historic venue on Florida Street to the neighborhood of Villa Crespo, Jorge Macchi built a life-sized wooden replica of the old room and embedded it inside the new one, creating a spatial matryoshka that generated ghostly echoes between the divergent histories of the gallery. The installation was called Díptico, and one could wander through it freely.
Now, however, in Cámara translúcida, Macchi creates a space of difficult access: a mysterious wall of floating bricks that blocks the entrance to the room, sealed six meters further ahead by a lattice of cement perforated by the missing bricks, as if the materials of a wall had divorced. Both parts define a new space of transparencies and, through them, by placing the eye at the right angle, it is possible to see a large painting at the back of the gallery.
To spy on it up close, the visitor must alter the usual route: climb a side staircase, pass through the succession of desks and offices with their transactions generally invisible to the public (among which Macchi arranged a series of works resembling small cages and watercolor-painted eyeballs), and finally descend back into the room by crossing a storage area packed with works by other artists. Upon descending, a huge painting that seems forced to become a grid awaits us. It is the representation of the bricks of a wall through which fragments of a Japanese erotic print emerge. Art history conceives the painting as a window onto the world, but a painting can also be a strange and opaque body, imprisoned by its outline.
Macchi’s works investigate the thinking of our eyes. They are dense and intricate semantic networks, images that explore the act of seeing and reveal how the relationship between what we see and what we know never fully stabilizes. By blocking one access, the artist reveals another usually hidden: the internal flows of movement in an art gallery, the lateral corridors of the private art circuit. Cámara translúcida could be a portrait of the art system with its zones of symbolic and literal exclusion, its voyeuristic perspectives, and its exposure of the offstage as part of the spectacle.
Roland Barthes once remarked that history has a hysterical structure: “It only constitutes itself if one looks at it, and to look at it one must be excluded from it.” The works in this exhibition balance in a play of closure and opening, and their power lies in their ability to complicate our gaze, to point toward unimagined paths for our desire.
By Laura Hakel.
