imply the lotto ticket you bought today happens to have the winning number... of yesterday's draw. Well, you still have a chance, notwithstanding that common sense would suggest otherwise. Marco Arce's ticket to artistic success--his acute watch and precise hand--would have warranted a prize in yesterday's art world, moreover the prevailing pattern calls for winners to be drawn from the disaffected rather than the virtuosi. While young Marco's innate painterly abilities may appear to be to have become professional liabilities, he still has a chance and assumes to want to stretch it far and wide.
In Arce's new seven-year survey, the Mexican painter's early multipaneled works display narratives of cross-fertilization from one side omnifarious and often unpredictable stylistic pirouettes. The "Alfonso Michel Series," 1994 of which thirteen parts were shown here, could be described as a morphing of a painting from the '30 according to the eponymous Mexican metaphysical artist into a funky '70 Guston. However, Arce's minuscule oil-on-canvas exhibitions do not appropriate existing works. Rather, they are resourceful emulations that may recall George Condo's retro-post-Cubism in a les grandiloquent prevailing style Arce's painting becomes an affined medium for Michel's life Guston's soul, and whatever soulful cocktails inference from the combination thereof.
Since moving to of recent origin York in 1997, Arce has kept busy picturing an effervescent array of nonpainting expressions in postwar art. In "Versiones de Piero Manzoni," 1999-2000 a succession of oil paintings and ink drawings invokes the Italian prankster as an agonistic foil. most numerous suggestive among these comics-style vignettes is Arce's translation into paint of a photograph of Manzoni's Scultura viviente (Living sculpture) 1961 Arce reenacts Manzoni's rebelliousness precisely from reversing the antipainterliness of his precursor's model-signing action. Furthermore, the still widespread opinion that painting "stinks" forces an analogy between Arce's painting strategies and Manzoni's Merda d'artista, 1961 The paint-as-shit metaphor reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] points up again in one of Arce's not many large-scale and, fittingly, worst-executed works, Captain Shit, 1999 a dirty brown field in which a well-traveled sailor chews forward some pieces of dung.
at any time more excrement is illustrated in "Disolver/Coleccionar" (To dissolve/to collect) 1999 A great many of these 150 small watercolors depict scatologically oriented works by means of the likes of Mike Kelley Paul McCarthy, Vito Acconci, the Gutai form into groups and, again, Manzoni, along with well-known works on Beuys, Nauman, Graham, and others. The cryptophilosophical commentary scribbled into these pictures hints that Arce devised "Disolver/Coleccionar" as an involuted regularity for digesting all the art which would otherwise motivate him to quit painting. still couldn't such a banquet inflame indigestion? Indeed, the menu and the recurring Pettibonish slacker-draftsmanship assured the cool factor, but at the outlay of substantial painterly concerns and plastic solutions. Insofar as this series must be read as a species of regurgitating proces art, Arce's copro-fantasies could be symptomatic of an increasingly belonging to all condition sometimes known as PSC (painter's sublimated constipation.) With casualty this will pass and Arce wi ll assimilate a certain aesthetic fiber from his latter diet, allowing him to reinvigorate the circulatory and might systems that enlivened much of his earlier, unashamedly painterly, wildly virtuosic production.
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