Total Paintant

Grounded in several disciplines, Fabian Marcaccio’s hybrid work incorporates painting, printmaking and digitizing techniques, photography, architecture, science fiction, and social theory in a sophisticated and incredibly dynamic synthesis. Rococo in their physical form, his “paintants,” or mutant paintings, aim to subvert the traditional conventions of late modernist painting by representing linguistic, poetic, political, existential, formal, and spatial realities in one cacophonous expression. Tautly stretched over hidden braces that intermittently push the surface of the work out toward the viewer, these vibrant constructions suggest complex systems that could interact in unpredictable ways. Total Paintant confounds the logic of how we usually look at a painting and challenges every assumption about what we expect to find within seemingly static works of art. Macro to micro and back again, Marcaccio’s discrete clusters of imagery, like little theaters of activity, spread virus-like across the work’s panoramic expanse. By offering us this analogue to the flux, speed, and daily intensity of contemporary life, the New York–based artist stakes a claim to the relevance—indeed the urgency—of art as a necessary discourse.