“PISCINA” (2009), BY JORGE MACCHI, IS ONE OF THE NEW PERMANENT INSTALLATIONS INAUGURATING IN INHOTIM

“Piscina” (Swimming Pool – 2009) was commissioned by Inhotim to the artist in mid-2008 and is the first multidimensional construction to be made from one of his watercolors. Since the beginning of his career, Jorge Macchi has created an expressive group of drawings and paintings on paper, depicting the fusion of several everyday life objects turned into surreal situations. In some of these works, the image of an alphabetically ordered phonebook comes out turned into a swimming pool. In close dialogue with the institution, the artist has developed a site-specific recreation of this image, as a swimming pool placed in an area of expansion in Inhotim, close to a farm, as if it were a part of it.

In the complex scale game involved in the operation of turning a drawing into a work of architectural scale, the artist and Inhotim collaborated to find a solution for the transposition. Macchi has chosen white concrete and rock to cover the surface of the pool, in order to come closer to the paper’s smoothness. However, the work is able to function as a real swimming pool, allowing the spectator to use it. The project therefore moves from imaginary to real, from dream to body, along graphic design, sculpture, and architecture.   

Everyday life situations and objects are the raw material of Jorge Macchi, an artist who has exhibited his drawings, collages, installations, and videos internationally since the 1990s. The artist has already used maps, musical scores, and newspapers, borrowing them and manipulating them delicately, in operations whose simplicity is evident and humor refined. By representing trivial elements and retelling almost invisible stories, the artist joins a tradition of his country’s fictional literature, that of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, which proposes, historically, a reading of the surrealistic trends in Latin America.

Jorge Macchi participated in solo exhibitions in several European institutions and at the Biennials of New Orleans (2008), São Paulo (2004 and 2006) and Venice (2005). In 2007, a great sweeping exhibition, devoted to his oeuvre at the Mercosul Biennial, in Porto Alegre, also traveled to the United States and Spain. In Inhotim, besides “Piscina” (2009), the works “Fuegos de artifício” (2002), in the exhibition “Pontos de Vista,” at Galeria Mata, and “La ciudad luz” (2007), in the exhibition “Lugares” at Galeria Fonte, are currently on display.