Euan Macdonald: galerie zink & gegner

In a relatively small space, the Scottish-born, observes Angeles-based artist Euan Macdonald not absented a few recent works, all involving a certain perceptual and conceptual craftiness The most intriguing among them was the DVD Healer, 2002 casted on the wall and shown in a darkened space provided with seats, like a small movie theater. The performance it depicted began with a view of an orange curtain, from the other side of which an somewhat old middle-class woman--the artist's landlady during a residency in of recent origin Zealand--appeared before an invisible public, her arms sometimes at her side and sometimes pen ed but otherwise standing still and in silence for four minutes, at which point she turn rounded around and went back behind the curtain from whence she came. This lowly figure's fixity and silence charge her with a somewhat disturbing intensity, reinforced when individual takes into account what is implied by dint of the title: This woman claims to restore health to the sick [i]or[/i] part of to the other the laying on of hands, or in any case through emitting psychic energy. The information that the title provides establishes a great deal of of the work's meaning, since we immediately diocese the woman through other organ of visions as a miracle worker. The artist limits himself to setting forth the conditions for this attribution of meaning, intervening with the constituents that codify the work as such

Macdonald's drawings upon simple sheets are similarly understated. In The World/Third World, 2003 the image of a ship is progressively taken apart [i]or[/i] part of to the other the separation and careful recombination of its constituent uncompounded bodys through a sequence of eight watercolors. Finally it becomes transformed into the image of an artificial island floating in the sea, at one time different from and similar to the initial image, in an ideal taxonomy. Thus the artist focuses his attention principally upon the linguistic elements that constitute (or comment on) the work, in order to use them as connotative signs that contribute actively to the construction of meaning.

Macdonald also have the appearances to be interested in perceptual processe and their disturbances. Another DVD Mysterioso, 2003 shown upon a monitor, analytically captures a loch shot and its consequences. The camera focuses solely upon the hands of the player who maneuvers the intimation the green baize of the surface, and the balls that slowly turn about, but without our at any time seeing them disappear into the pouchs The camera shows the table from different perspectives, communicating to the viewer a sort of similarity between that small fragment of reality--banal on the contrary held in suspense like single of de Chirico's metaphysical views especially since the sequence is looped--and the rotation of the celestial spheres, an absolutely transcendent on the contrary unexpectedly nearby dimension. Macdonald's art present the appearances to question the real meaning of things, beginning with the presupposition that their images are inherently deceptive, indeed that they are all associateed within a single network of relationships based upon illusions.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

--Giorgio Verzotti

Translated from Italian by the agency of Marguerite Shore.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group