X, Y, Z
press release
The body of work of Marco Pires, particularly in regard to the field of drawing, is developed in accordance with a dialectic movement of thesis and antithesis, or rather, affirmation and negation. This system stems from the utilizing and re-contextualizing of documents and images the artist collects for later intervention, suspending their scientific attributes and introducing new layers that open the works to new approaches and readings – a dimension from whence error, hesitation and variation emerge. This act of re-contextualizing pre-existing elements can be paralleled to the practice of détournement, which, before being systematized and studied in the texts of the Situationist International, had appeared decades before with the use of collage, introduced by Picasso at the start of the XXth century and then reused by both Dadaists and Surrealists by mixing text, painting and pictures of all and any provenance in an attempt to subvert the bourgeois aesthetic values of the time. This is of course not Marco Pires’ intention, as historically détournement as a subversive practice has evolved and followed social and artistic trends, fusing with music via punk and the DIY ethos, and ultimately being absorbed by the very capitalist system it aimed to put in question.
More relevant to Marco Pires is the recuperation of a ludic system stemming from the possibility of developing new paradigms based on the connections and associations between the objects and documents that are his point of departure, at once denying them and handing them over, thus creating new reading possibilities.
The small-scale drawings and the homogenous paintings of geometric, monochromatic shapes on photographs embody this study on détournement: the former in a tense register of lines linking organic and geometric elements; the latter – monochromatic paintings on photography – erasing the geographic documents underneath.
In the second room we see "3 monochromes, from the series The Bellman’s map" – the title of which is a direct reference to Lewis Carroll’s "The hunting of the Snark". In it, the leader of the expedition gives his crew a map to aid them in their hunt. Absurdly, this map is a uniform surface, a blank page. Stefan Kanfer sees this existential and absurd poem as a representation of the agony of man before the absence of coordinates, leading to drifting. This quest – fundamental for mankind – hides the horror of failure.
The series titled "Topoi" is presented here as a book of 14 colour photographs, two of which have been printed to hang on a wall and one slide. Topoi is the plural of topos, a greek word used in the 1960’s by Alexander Grothendieck to define a mathematical object that aids identify a place, as postulated by his theory of “étale cohomology”.
According to the artist, this series is an evolution in his work process, which had hitherto been developed within search and research frames, study work – as in a laboratory not directly linked to its study subjects. This series promoted direct incursions, the materialization of which found in photography its main outlet. Such an exercise called for pedological, psychogeographic incursions, as well as in-study registry. Here we may find an industrial design object, types of soil and vegetation, communication and transport structures, extraction of prime matter, a dwelling or a portrait, all together creating an atlas of images constituting an index of physical and social surroundings similar to scientific illustrations such as can be found in old geography books.
White Lies
statement
The concept of white lies was first associated to the study of cartography by Mark Monmonier, a geographer who adopts a critical stance regarding the evolution of maps, being somewhat sceptical of the manipulation exerted by some of these models of reality. According to Monmonier, a map constructs a representation that is based on deliberate distortions, doing away with exactitude and truth in an effort to better depict the essential.
According to this notion, the map undertakes a spatial abstraction, developing a language that allows it to communicate and analyse data. From that basis emerge those elements called cartograms, which combine the topographic survey of a particular area with information concerning the distribution, frequency or intensity of certain phenomena. “A cartogram is a purposely-distorted thematic map that emphasizes the distribution of a variable by changing the area (or lengths) of objects on the map”, according to James A. Dougenik (1985).
My homonymous series develops itself in accordance with the cartograms’ form of construction. In an attempt to recontextualise documents such as ancient contour maps, which are themselves outdated information, I fragmented their spatial structures through a series of discontinuities, deletions and subtractions. This intervention conceals certain areas and consequently reveals others, especially those containing the document’s captions, whose original referents are replaced by the formless, discontinuous monochrome mass which now covers each map.
The black sketchbooks series consists of small pages taken from moleskine notebooks, on which fragments of maps are printed and then worked on with various materials, from writing implements to oil stains, re-drawing each document in a game of tensions and erasures, an exercise of displaced intentions which separated themselves from reality. Project, hesitation, error, direction and drift all combine into an autonomous language that competes with the topology on the maps from which it emerges, pointing towards a referential and spatial repositioning. The pages are then photographed and large-format prints are made.