The early hours of the morning, sleepless.
A snowy TV screen becomes a blank canvas waiting for paint. Though maybe it’s the other way round, and it is actually the canvas itself, the one that has the potential to be a painting, that has become a television screen on which to project an image, with all its roughness, its grain, its miniscule barely perceptible alterations, those that induce an added murmur that sometimes calls to mind a winter storm. Alex Marco’s works are always underwritten by an ambiguousness that responds to a constant questioning of the medium. One might think, or at least this has been oft repeated, it is solely circumscribed to painting but nevertheless it also includes video.
They are highly enigmatic. And also hypnotic, like when, in the early hours of the morning, sleepless and restless, you end up watching the blank television screen. The day’s programme is over, the test card has announced the end of broadcasting, and all that remains are those fuzzy black and white dots, the remnants of what was once an image, the television signal. Sometimes those black and white dots, what we would probably now call pixels, jumped around more than usual, what today we might call a glitch: some electrical impulse interrupted the monotony and gave rise to new forms that barely lasted a moment, mere milliseconds, just enough to be perceived. This noise, as it is sometimes called, added a new dimension: sound. These shimmering black and white dots have a lot to do with buzzing, murmuring, whispering. They make you doubt, because his works are never what they seem to be, like that television screen which seems to be emptied of images but is in itself an image. Or, better still, they are what they seem to be, but they are also something else. He pushes the limits of what is expected, the boundaries of the mediums he uses: painting, video and sound. On this occasion, he has triggered a two-way journey, from the screen to the canvas and the canvas to the screen, from video synthesis to the paintbrush and from the paintbrush to digitization, imposing on himself a number of rules that he follows to the letter, rigorously—another of the words that defines his practice as an artist.
Marco’s works always seem to convey the sensation that time has been put on hold, even though it continues apace. One can appreciate this in his interest in traces, in prints, in the residues left behind by many of his projects. The whole process is subtended by a sense of melancholia. Just like when, in the early hours of the morning, sleepless and restless, you are hypnotized by the screen.
_Sergio Rubira