Born 1963 | Lives and works in New York
In an age of zombie formalism, Fabian Marcaccio gives us Frankenstein: His paintings don’t simply re-inhabit the tropes and vocabularies of the history of abstract painting, they cannibalize and contaminate them; his paintings are mobilized by their many disjunctive parts. But the New York–based Argentine-Italian painter has long been responding to the supposed death of painting, making active and hybrid works in its expanded field.
The artist gained international attention in the 1990s when he began to make his series of “Paintants,” or mutant paintings, that question the conventions of the medium in light of the burgeoning digital era. The series employs elements of digital photography and sculpture to emphasize and manipulate the spatial and temporal aspects of painting. Over its many iterations, the series has integrated the forms and logics of street and online advertising, architecture, and animation in order to corrupt and mutate an image, opening it up to new kinds of interpretation.
Marcaccio’s paintings are muscular and squirrely, often characterized by excess and ornamentation that is pushed to into paradox with the ways in which the works are ultimately structural: The most fundamental elements of painting—canvas, brushstroke, stretcher—are emphasized so that they become the content of the work, rather than the means or support. “I oppose the dissolution or substitution of painting by other domains,” the artist once described. “I am interested in absorbing other domains into painting.”
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