3DEP3: Fabian Marcaccio

In line with this year’s Berlin Art Week (September 13–18), Galerie Thomas Schulte presents a 3D printed Environmental Painting by Fabian Marcaccio spanning the gallery’s 9 metre high Corner Space. Suspended by cables 3DEP3 transforms the space into what appears to be an apocalyptic underwater scenario.

Fabian Marcaccio’s 3DEP3 consists of an intriguing constellation of so-called plastemas that are 3D printed, painted objects made from coloured plastic and pigmented silicone of various dynamic and organic shapes that continue his alteration of gestures from Expressionism. It resembles an open expanded pictorial nervous system. On closer inspection, little by little, we furthermore discover and recognise among the more abstract shapes objects and symbols – ranging from human organs, automatic weapons, and knives to paintbrushes, power plugs, star and cross, hammer and sickle. Like the remainders of an otherwise lost and forgotten tale these objects appear as fragments of stories of war and terror, of religion, and perhaps ultimately of the end of the civilised world. They are like a dynamic present/future archaeology of painting. In contrast to some of Marcaccio’s earlier works, 3DEP3 describes not so much a specific historical event, but a certain US-American state of mind ranging from celebrity and pop culture to politics and economics.

As one of the pioneers of digital painting since the 1990s, Marcaccio works in what he once called ‘the expanded field of painting’ merging painting with photo-digital techniques and sculptural 3D printing in order to redefine the pictorial genre. Analytically engaging with today’s flood of media images Marcaccio takes a critical position towards the manipulative power of images and digital processing techniques; a position based on the conviction that a digitally altered photo loses its indexical relation to reality and in essence is as abstract as the brush strokes in a painting. Marcaccio’s concept for his works, his so-called Paintants – a neologism from painting and mutant – reflects the idea of the pictorial genre in constant re-development and in the context of the constant flux of digital images as well as of the shifting values and changing world views at the beginning of the 21st century.

On the occasion of awarding Fabian Marcaccio the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2011 curator Marc Wellmann used a famous quote by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini: ‘Sculpture is truth, which even a blind man must concede. But painting is deception, lies.’ Marcaccio’s venture of merging painting into 3D may thus be read as a re-territorialisation or re-materialisation of painting, and as an attempt to create images that are tangible, palpable, and which although defying any one fixed narrative or truth, request our attention and encourages us, the beholders, to move inside and between the works. To this end Marcaccio himself once called his works ‘action paintings for the beholder’; paintings in which the beholder must become active and moving thereby mirroring the processural nature of perception and mental processes of interpretation and reality construction.

Fabian Marcaccio, born in Rosario de Santa Fe, Argentina, in 1963, has lived and worked in New York since the 1980s. He is known in Germany through his solo exhibitions at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, Museum Lehmbruck in Duisburg,  Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, and the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt. His work Multiple Site Paintants was exhibited at documenta 11 in 2002. When Marcaccio received the Bernhard Heiliger Prize for Sculpture in 2011, the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin marked the occasion with the exhibition The Structural Canvas Paintant. Marcaccio‘s work is represented in large national and international collections, such as the Sammlung Goetz in Munich and the Daros Collection in Zurich and Rio de Janeiro. Important international exhibitions  of his work include the Biennales in Havana and Moscow and various shows in North and South America. Currently Marcaccio‘s work is on view in the group exhibitions The Adventure of our Collection: Re-opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, and in “Thought and Matter”: Italian and Argentine artists at the Certosa of Capri at the Istituto Garuzzo per le Arti Visive, Capri, Italy.