Brush with Destiny

FABIAN MARCACCIO LAYS THE PAINT ON THICK

Opening this fall at New York's Gorney Bravin & Lee gallery, Fabian Marcaccio's exhibition "Janeila's Five Moves" tells a tangled multi-media story using abstract-painting panels, digital animation, and a robotic painting machine that shoots paintballs, trapping the viewer in the crossfire. "It will make a kind of sniper fire creating beauty, action, and uncertainty at the same time," says Marcaccio. "It is about a sense of marking and how we think about gestures, how dangerous gestures can be." It is an eruption of plenty, a heavy-metal hybrid of elements voluptuous, baroque, fertile.

"I think of him as a kind of philosopher who is using the visual medium of art to say what he wants to say," says art dealer John Post Lee.

Within his mixed-media maps of social, political, and sexual images Marcaccio is concerned with the atomization of perception, our everyday bombardment by experience, as well as exploring or exploding painting's formal elements—the literal structure of the painting, the stretcher bar, brushstroke, drip, splatter.

A native of Argentina married to architect Galia Solomonoff, Marcaccio, 38, is obsessive, enthusiastic, optimistic, and deeply interested in the dark side of things. "Moments of crisis can be good moments for thinking," he says energetically. "Making art is like constantly teaching yourself how to understand what you have in front of you."

A.M.H.