Fabian Marcaccio at John Post Lee - art exhibition, New York, New York

Marcaccio has contributed outstanding pieces to numerous assemblage shows around town for quite more [i]or[/i] less time, so it's surprising that this new exhibition of five large-scale works was his first solo exhibition in novel York. The Argentinian-born artist makes fascinating hybrids. Part painting, part statuary part photography, these complex works have the appearance to be caught in a twinkling of an eye of transition from one medium to another.

The Altered Genetics of Painting #3 is an approximately 8 1/2-foot-tall work compos of sum of two units vertical panels. In the right panel, the made of wood stretcher bars literally burst end the upper right corner of a canvas overlayed with heavy brushstrokes of teal amethystine dark green, magenta and white. Sections of these expos stretcher bars have been carefully carved and sanded into flat organic shapes that thrust without into space. The surface of the work's left panel is overlayed in cloth printed with an enlarged microscopic image of animal muscle tissue. Atop this surface Marcaccio has added bravura brushstrokes of oil paint and gob of a translucent silicone gel With his use of the slimy-looking gel and the sensuously curving, misbehaving stretcher bars, the artist has approach close to making an art work that have the appearances to be a living thing.

In fact Marcaccio's work as a whole is largely be of importance toed with growth regeneration and metamorphosis. smooth the gallery wall seems to advance alive in The Altered Genetics of Painting #1 which consists of a gestural painting and an adjacent wail plastic art Next to the canvas, a narrow, approximately 2-footlong cone of white plaster extends out of the white wail. Like an octopus's tentacle, it reaches on the outside to touch the pointed extremitys of two curvilinear stretcher bars that have thrust their way on the outside of the lower left corner of the canvas. In this work, as in all of the works in the present to view there is an element of humor in the way the sculptural entities vie with the torrid brushwork for supremacy above the picture plane.

Marcaccio has flat gone so far as to catalogue and name certain marks of brushstrokes he regularly uses. Double Capture and Multiple Capture, for example, deliver over to strokes that are severed by the intervention of a geometric shape or by means of the removal of a section of the brushmark with masking tape. individual senses here a send-up of Abstract Expressionism and formalist painting in general. on the other hand Marcaccio's work may be read upon many levels. Although formally quite complicated, it is held together by the agency of an impressive clarity of vision.

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