Fabián Marcaccio: "The Structural Canvas Paintants"

Since the early 1990s Fabián Marcaccio is concerned with questioning and expanding the classical concept of painting. In his "Paintaints" - a neologism formed from the terms "painting" and "mutant" - the concepts of painting, sculpture and object art are fused. The continually increasing sculptural tendency of his works has been recently condensed into large figurative tableaus, "Structural Canvas Paintants", due to whose outstanding sculptural quality he was awarded the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture. In his new group of works Marcaccio seizes on contemporary subjects from politics, economy and society. Among them are globalisation, bank crashes, transsexuality, genetic engineering and terrorism as well as the role of the media. In "CNN-Paintant", for example, he shows the frazzled body of a reporter working for the Cable News Network that lies on the floor and thus points to the never-ending infotainment culture of war, blood and horror that informs our visual everyday life. Like in a kind of modern history painting, Marcaccio tells about contemporary historical moments or events but asks his spectators to question their verisimilitude.

In parallel with "The Structural Canvas Paintants", the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld showcases "Some USA Stories" - a series of about 15 works, specially created for the venue, which particularly address subjects that belong to the dark side of recent US history: Topics such as the Mexican Drug War, the massacre in Waco, Texas, the mass suicide in Guyana directed by Jim Jones, the massacre at Fallujah or the school shootings at Columbine High School (March 18 through August 19, 2012).