Uruguayan Marco Maggi's needle-thin line drawing webs, nearly invisibly,
across surfaces of aluminum, mat black, and paper white.

Drawings perceptible only through the shadows they cast are made of
the most modest materials. Inscriptions (or encryptions) in Maggi's voca-
bulary of "pre-Columbian and post-Clintonian" abstraction suggest in-
comprehensible alphabets, genome mapping and satellite surveillance.

The vast and infinitesimal are identical.

The seemingly empty universe is dense with inaccessible information.

Deafening white noise.

A three-thousand-square-foot paper carpet of intricate incisions and
microsculptural monuments casts diminutive shadows that might repre-
sent great un-built cities or bacterial colonies. The echoes of Carl Andre
and Felix Gonzales-Torres are only formal. Maggi is not about walking on
or picking up, but crouching down and looking at. A myopic intimacy that
is not only informative, but transformative.

In the past two years Maggi has completed installations at the São Paulo
Biennial; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Buenos Aires; the Museo
de Arte Contemporaneo de Santiago, Chile; The Kemper Museum of Con-
temporary Art in Kansas City; Centro Cultural de Espana, Montevideo; the
III and IV Bienal del Mercursor in Brazil as well as galleries in New York,
Houston, London, Rome, and São Paulo. In October, he will install his piece
called inCUBAdora at the VIII Bienal de la Habana.

related articles:
Look closely: It's not what you think.
by Kenneth Baker, SF Chronicle
Saturday, September 20, 2003

Raising Expectations,
by Alison Bing
special to SF Gate