Fernando Bryce, Eugenio Dittborn and Jorge Macchi

April 18 - June 2, 2023

Fernando Bryce’s drawings systematically re-examine the way historical events are represented in media and cultural production. Bryce describes his work as ‘mimetic analysis,’ which involves culling archives for advertisements, newspaper articles, propaganda pamphlets, comics, and other print materials relating to specific political developments. He then reproduces these original documents in ink on standard paper formats.

Included in the exhibition, Bryce’s Art News 1944-1947 is comprised of 31 ink drawings recreating gallery advertisements published in the prevailing English-language contemporary art magazine during this period. While the drawings consist of ads for solo gallery exhibitions, the underlying content is the diffusion and representation of European, Japanese, North and South American artists in postwar New York. Le service des explosifs is based on an article published by the newspaper Le Petit Parisien in 1914 that detailed the arrest of two Russians outlaws in Paris who were on their way to commit terrorist attacks against Russian authorities.

Eugenio Dittborn began his series of ‘Airmail Paintings’ in 1984, applying various paint, silk-screen, and collage techniques to large sheets of brown wrapping paper which could be folded down to one-sixteenth of its size and sent in large envelopes through the international mail system. Dittborn has twice changed the material of the underlying structure of these works: in 1986 to a non-woven fabric and again in 1994 to cotton duck. The ‘Airmail Painting’ were Dittborn’s solution to the difficulties of working in a distant place; It was a way of disguising his artwork, bypassing bureaucracy and establishing a presence in the international art world.

The ‘Airmail Paintings’ included in the exhibition span the artist’s career. In Desierta (h.l.p.), Airmail Painting No. 148, two sections of sateen are stitched onto the cotton duck support and images of skeletons, a cactus and bones all bring to mind the Atacama desert in northern Chile, known as the driest desert in the world. The words of an Inca poem are inscribed on the envelope. 

Jorge Macchi works in a wide range of mediums from painting, sculpture, and works on paper to installation, video and performance art. The artist’s work can be defined through its precise sense of perception and observation; he utilizes refined visual codes while appealing to the viewers’ experience of the world and everyday life.

A selection of Macchi’s paintings are included in the exhibition. Departing from the ordinary and coincidental, the artist’s paintings alter scale and context, employing a system of layered visual complications in order to escape a predictable interpretation of the medium and move toward an understanding of painting tied to individual experience and ambiguity. In the oil on canvas work, False Ceiling, a series of reproductions and ruptures disrupts what appears to be geometrically architectural setting to create a fragmented and indefinite space.