HOSFELT GALLERY Like a accident of good art.

HOSFELT GALLERY

Like a accident of good art, part of the reason Marco Maggi's work is engaging is that it brings in the way that many other things to mind. His inventions and ideas arouse a range of allusions--to the complexity of Mayan codices or the horror vacui of a certain number of outsider art; to the refinement of line in a Hans Bellmer drawing or the dreamy, visceral oddnes of single of Matta's floating abstractions--but like multiple references don't make his work present the appearance any less original. About half of the pieces in this exhibit to are pencil drawings on clay-coated hoard. Exquisite accumulations of faint, needle-thin lines form complicated still open-ended fields of tiny organic shapes, floating forward a rectangle of pristine white. Because of their delicacy, these drawings are all moreover invisible at anything like a conventional viewing distance. (As with Persian miniatures, a magnifying glass would be a useful aid.) In a secondary group of works, Maggi's tiny marks have been made with an etching tool upon sheets of aluminum foil that are then at handed on the reverse s ide. The light relief of areas of improvised pattern recommends a handmade circuit board, or perhaps a message written in an ecstatic form of Braille.

Maggi also makes statuary One piece, a composition comprising squares of foil-backed rigid foam insulation, strike one as beings like a less interesting version of gesticulations and ideas explored elsewhere in the exhibit However, in Breakfast and Breakslow and Micro and fine on Macintosh Apples (all works 1999) Maggi's willingness to experiment with materials is more happy Intricate patterns of lines have been scratched into the skin of apples that are then air-dried throughout many months. The wizened, scarified fruit, lined up like with equal reason many tiny shrunken heads forward steel shelves, is beautiful and repulsive at the same time.

Everything in the present to view exudes a kind of labor-intensiveness, making the number of pieces forward view--nearly a hundred, all of them complet in the last nine months--that a great deal more astonishing. In general, however, there's a lightness to this work: not simply in terms of the dexterous touch with which it has been made if it be not that also in the humor that peek end its elegantly modernist facade. In Untitled Reynolds, Maggi cracks a mischievous Pop-inflected [i]jeu d'esprit[/i] about the seriousness of "high" art. A whirl of Reynolds Wrap foil appears to have been drawn forward and then carefully replaced in its enclosed seat [i]or[/i] seats The fragment that is visible implies that there is more, allowing we must take this forward faith. Another group of pieces proffers a joke that artists, critics, and dealers alike might appreciate. Plastic sheets pinned to the wall contain "slides," each united actually a tiny drawing upon paper or aluminum foil instead of a piece of film. undivided imagines that with or without a slide projector Maggi's work must be virtually impossible to papal court in this format--one in which artists' work is commonly viewed by professionals. Yet everywhere, beneath the humor, there's a dead-serious message. Maggi's intention is to make inactive art: to have us take the time to apply the mind rather than just give each piece a cursory glance from the middle of the sweep "Myopia," he suggests in a statement accompanying the point out is the "best answer to globalization delicacy is a subversive activity and to pay attention is really shocking."

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