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May 02 - Jun 01 2024 - 18 days left

Chelsea, New York: 532 Jäckel presents The Ephemeral Island of Motorama, an exhibition of sculptures, and works on paper by Mexican-born artist Paco Marcial. The Ephemeral Island of Motorama will open on May 2nd, 2024 and run through June 1, 2024. This is Marcial's first solo exhibition with the gallery. The works of Paco Marcial linger somewhere between fanfic and a love affair. His chosen theme, which he returns to again and again with (in his words) a passion "verging on oneiric romanticism," is motorsports racing. But this romanticized obsession with racing, with cars and their sheer potential for brutality, beauty, precarity, and speed is not wholly about fantasy so much as analogy. Marcial finds significant correspondences between the mechanics of racing and the love of art. Between competitive sports and the search for beauty, we are equally spectators and progenitors, remolding ourselves into ultra-modern forms that are limited only by the physics of bodies and the historical rules of the game. In The Ephemeral Island of Motorama, Marcial calls attention not only to the fragility of human relationship to the rush of speed and metal, but to the iconicity of the technologies that have surrounded the sport for decades. Incidental colors, graphic design styles, and now hard-to-come-across tech (landlines, anyone?) fill the rooms of Marcial's works like magic mirrors. We see ourselves in them, but in a way where our past and our future have collapsed on themselves. The image reflected back to us shows us what remains constant as much as what is intrinsically ephemeral. And both what endures and what rushes past us are essential features of our involvement in life on this planet. A work like '70 Au Naturel, drawn in faded primary colors, quite literally highlights momentary desires against less yielding continental earth. The array of objects placed in the coffee table, where a Playboy Magazine is prominently displayed as much as trappers and a rotary phone, speak to a bygone time and ways of relating ourselves to the world. On the other hand, the floating, map-like form situated above the table, seems almost timeless on account of its abstract dimensions. This spatial ensign is a visible extension of the earth itself, with its tectonic innards and flesh-like surface. It also suggests the contours of a racetrack: a kind of earth catalog fenced in by human design, which is all the more sculptural and aesthetic for its environing character. Marcial's translation of racing into art, coupled with all the loving accoutrements we attached to each, suggests that we are most involved with whatever art is represented when we are inside it. In this way, functional design and representational imagery play off each other. Sculptural works, such as Dolce Mixiuhcan Fare Niente and Indianapolis Dal Canto V instance this in the way they place an aestheticized torso of a humanoid form on top of a gas canister-the vintage of the latter recalling the glory of races long ago. Between the legacy of art and the legacy of functional design, the viewer senses a certain prestige partitioned out to both. However deformed humans might become (though tragedy, accident, or devolution), we can also still see ourselves in the technology we surround ourselves with. These artifacts are externalizations of our spiritual core. For further information or to schedule an interview with the artist, please contact 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel by e-mail at info@532gallery.com