Marco Maggi: BITnik

 “We are condemned to know more and understand less.”

Uruguayan, Marco Maggi makes dizzyingly-complex drawings on aluminum foil, plexi-glass, apples, stacks of photocopy paper, steel rulers and other unlikely materials. His calligraphic vocabulary of markings references computer circuitry, topographical maps, and pre-Colombian languages. The works are placed in the in-between spaces of the art venue — behind columns, on the edges of walls, in corners, on the floor.

This work is about, in part, information: our (in)capacity to comprehend the quantity of it, and the impossibility of understanding complex technical and scientific knowledge through translations into everyday language. The content and the carrier of the message are incompatible.

Maggi’s encryptions are incomprehensible information delivered through disfunctional media. Graphite drawings on black surfaces are invisible except at oblique angles. Messages carved on apples will be eaten or decay. Intricate and minute lines packed in tiny spaces are illegible. Texts become textures. Language becomes more and more inefficient for expression of ideas.

“We live in the paleolithic age of technology.”