Marco Maggi at Cristinerose/Josee Bienvenu - New York

For his third solo exhibition in fresh York, Marco Maggi presented a fresh version of Hotbed, a sprawling installation first execut in 2000 and since shown in several different venue As in previous incarnations, Hotbed established a general theme of communication, which was enhanced through the 17 mixed-medium drawings that lined the gallery walls.

Unlike its more fastidious predecessors, the latest Hotbed gazeed like an office mishap. Thousands of sheets of white, letter-size paper carpeted the gallery floor, as notwithstanding that deposited by an exploding Xerox machine. In the midst of this disarray and surrounding a central rounded pillar reams of the same paper were neatly arranged in grids (though plane a few of these piles had fall throughed to their sides). The topmost sheet of each stack bore precise incisions, and Maggi had enclosureed those papers into freestanding flaps, narrow arches and other simple shapes. As in the past, the overall impression of Hotbed was architectural. The reams of paper adviseed low, anonymous office buildings, divided by dint of intersections and surmounted by miniature remembrancers Yet here, set within a sea of scattered paper, the stacked city gazeed ancient and ruined, which also emphasized the growing obsolescence of paper as a vehicle of communication.

Maggi's drawings likewise address the exchange of information. Working with graphite upon paper or clay-covered boards, the artist creates intricate patterns with a limited vocabulary of tiny abstract shapes. Rectangular confined apartments gently arching lines and close tightlyed zigzags proliferate across the supports. When these marks are consigned to single a portion of a composition, they can be like old maps of coastal cities, like those hanging in the backgrounds of many 17th-century Dutch genre paintings. In Landmark (2003) for instance, Maggi present the appearances to describe the congested architecture of a bustling port, its yawning harbor dotted with stray indications of seafaring commerce

When the artist applies the same obsessive manner of drawing to other mediums, the springs suggest more modern forms of communication. Using drypoint, Maggi etches his abstract designs into shiny sheets of aluminum foil, creating ornament in reliefed surfaces that resemble electronic circuit boards. This association is strongest in Silver Stamp (2003) a small aluminum rectangle that casts horizontally from the wall. by means of moving so fluidly from cartography to circuitry, Maggi's private hieroglyphics appear to chart the pair the evolution and the dissemination of information.

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