For our first participation at Gallery Weekend Beijing, Galerie Thomas Schulte presents the exhibition Paintants with works by Fabian Marcaccio, featuring a suspended Environmental Painting titled 3DEP3 alongside wall-based Flex-Paintants.

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 toward the manipulative power of images and digital processing techniques. Created in the last three years during the pandemic, these works reveal a pronounced corporeality, even when set in tension with their own dissolution. In tandem with Marcaccio's process-oriented approach, the experience of viewing—the process of perception—becomes a source of action in the paintings: their appearance changes depending on our position and proximity. A ghostly image seen from a distance reveals a complex (re)organizing structure when seen up close. At times, they cannot be fully experienced unless approached from a particular angle. The Flex-Paintants are sometimes even suggestive of molecular structures. Their fibers alternately intertwining and coming undone, they are like paintings being turned inside out—we are not looking at, but into them. Identifiable figures and forms, or else suggestions of them, sometimes come through. We might recognize faces, grids and networks, plant-like tendrils and greenery, or some combination. Fingers meld with green vines, for example, simultaneously reaching out and getting reabsorbed into the elaborate tangle of constituent color segments. In one work, the indent of a face starts to resemble a pool—becoming a source of reflection for the face of the viewer, while burrowing into the surface like a muddy footprint. What is being emphatically demonstrated is that, like the body, painting is wet, ever-changing and in flux. Taking shape as a series of frozen moments, they could liquefy in an instant, further evolving into yet unseen variants.Bridging digital technology and organic matter in aesthetic, material, and production, the works on view are highly articulated and textured, though in varying states of abstraction and decomposition. Their abstract and fluid nature leaves them susceptible to myriad associations, bringing an increased sense of intimacy and immediacy: always emerging, they never fully crystallize.

Press release courtesy Galerie Thomas Schulte.