Fabian Marcaccio: paintant's progress: the intersections of gestural abstraction and digital technology, politics and Eros, continue to fascinate this multimedium artist, whose most recent show included painting, sculpture and computer animation

Fabian Marcaccio's recent exhibition at Gorney Bravin + Lee Gallery in New York was titled "Janeila's 5 Moves," and the "moves" are relatively easy to enumerate: the first was a group of paintings, the second a freestanding sculpture, the third a minute-long digital animation, and the fourth a computer-controlled "painting machine." It is only with the fifth move--which, Marcaccio said, was made by viewers, as they navigate the other four--that things got a little squishy. But to wade into Marcaccio's world even a little is to be overwhelmed by a sensory tidal wave that's powered by a cyclone of ideas on subjects ranging from the progress of modernist painting to the nexus of high finance and international terrorism.

One way in is to begin with the computer-generated animation (all works this show 2002), which is called Gesture's Responsibilities and was shown in DVD format on a roughly 2-by-3-foot wall-mounted, flat-panel screen. Marcaccio's first go at this medium, it opens with a flyover of what looks like a freely brushed painted surface; soon, we're skimming an arid landscape which, after some sensuous undulation and the emergence of a few telltale hairs, becomes flesh. As the vantage point pulls back, we see a human arm aswirl with paint strokes and, the coup de grace, a wound that spouts acid orange paint. As Marcaccio points out, this, the only moving image in the show, is the one that most holds viewers in place; seemingly time-based and documentary, it is pure, atemporal invention.

These paradoxes tip us off to one essential element of his process: which is generating heat through internal contradictions. The next series of images is painted, somewhat more conventionally, on a row of small canvases, but they're hung very close to the floor--"at dog height," says Marcaccio (this and all subsequent comments by the artist are from an interview done for the present article). They show an incrementally dissolving photo-based image of a roomful of men in suits (they are, as it happens, at a meeting of the International Monetary Fund) gathered round a lively bonfire. As the series progresses, the men (and the fire) gradually cede ground to the dark, blurry, gold-framed paintings that hang behind them. At the end, these paintings-within-paintings float in mute isolation, like the ancestral ghosts of industry's first captains, or of art's old masters.

But, for all its suggestive complexity, this group of canvases was just a footnote to the much bigger work that loomed on the wall above. Its title, given in a label applied (as is Marcaccio's habit) to one corner of the image as if to designer apparel, is Her Material in Focus; the canvas (like most others) is further designated a "paintant," Marcaccio's term for the distinctive image hybrid he has been cultivating for a decade. (The word conflates "painting" and "mutant.") This particular example begins with a photograph the artist took of the audience at an outdoor concert. A sunny picture, it was digitally fragmented and replicated before being enlarged and transferred to canvas, where it becomes mere wallpaper for quantities of further imagery, including the repeated image of a fetching young woman in sunglasses, submerged in a big blistered pour of clear silicone. Translucent and rubbery, this signature material appears on almost all the paintings here, substantiating bravura brushstrokes, or thrusting itself up in quasi-geological formations, or taking the form of fragments of some crypto-metropolis or of the fallout from a generic but all-too-credible Armageddon.

Indeed, in the next big painting, a lurid, glowering work that Marcaccio calls an anchor to the exhibition, the silicone outcroppings are intended to be no less than the materialization of darkness. Titled Janeila's Material Shadows, this painting showcases the exhibition's headliner, an alluring guerrilla fighter generally shown nude, as here, where her black hair tumbles teasingly over her face, obscuring features that are nowhere given clearly. Behind her surges a troubled sea of indefinable forms cast in inky silicone. The visible and tactile complications of this painting are manifold. Marcaccio's interest in gestural painting, for instance, branches to include not just Abstract Expressionism and its forebears, but the history of gesture more generally. It leads him, when discussing his work, to lay stress on every mark's semiotic status, whether indexical (like shadows, or casts from life or, usually, photographs), symbolic or diagrammatic. In a characteristically warp-speed analytic jump, Marcaccio, whose 229-foot-long Multiple-Site Paintants was one of the few paintings in Documenta 11, proceeds from the question of whether photography can be called a gestural medium, to the speculation that painting--Janeila's Material Shadows would be a good example--"can create a parallel model of how violence evolves."

Preceding Janeila's Material Shadows was a double row of smaller, richly illustrative paintings. Mostly set in deeply forested terrain, they show armed men in military fatigues, naked women, blood-spattered civilians and a solitary armored tank. A man in glasses presides over a table of bloody entrails which, Marcaccio says, represent the harvested human organs sold for personal and, sometimes, factional gain in the international market; a prisoner exchange is also part of the narrative. A moment of portentous pictorial quiet was provided by the ironically titled Babylon Noise, where we see lines drawn in the sand, a scrap of paper, a bit of flotsam and a plastic-molded object that morphs from gun grip to seaweed. If the narrative density of these images, and the profusion of techniques involved in their realization, is evidence of a creative process in barely controlled overdrive, sometimes Marcaccio just lets it rip. On the other side of Janeila's Material Shadows was the lively, splotch-and-drip pastel-colored mural--a kind of exploded Impressionism--created by the Paintant Robot. This kinetic (but not interactive) sculpture is adapted from the equipment used for Paintball, in which air guns are loaded with paint pellets that explode on contact. Here the gun, mounted high overhead, was triggered by digital software. Watching (and hearing) it fire "is like being inside an inkjet printer," says Marcaccio.