EXHIBITION // JORGE MACCHI - NAVIGATION PRIVEE // GALLERIA CONTINUA // PARIS

© Galleria Continua - Jorge Macchi

Jorge Macchi - Navigation Privée -  from Jan. 16, to March 2026

Galleria Continua
87 rue du Temple
75003, Paris

www.galleriacontinua.com

GALLERIA CONTINUA is pleased to present Navigation privée, Jorge Macchi’s first solo exhibition in its Paris Marais space.

The exhibition presents a new constellation of works that unfolds as a subtle and unsettling investigation into perception, absence, and the fragile mechanisms through which meaning is constructed. Conceived as a sequence of interruptions, suspensions, and rhythms, the exhibition invites the viewer into a space where what is missing becomes as active as what is present. The title Navigation privée suggests a double interpretation. On the one hand, it evokes an intimate journey, a private navigation - almost secret and introspective. On the other, it draws directly from contemporary digital language: private browsing, or incognito mode, a function designed to erase traces, suspend memory, and momentarily escape the accumulation of data.

Jorge Macchi’s work consistently challenges the relationship between the world and our perceptual systems. Through absences, deviations, and modulations, he dismantles the linearity of understanding, subverting a vision shaped by cultural conditioning and mechanical repetition.

It is within this lack that the gaze acquires creative power. Visitors are invited to engage in an active and personal reading.

The exhibition opens with the text « Envoie une lettre de menace à toi-même tout en dissimulant ton identité » (“ Send a threat letter to yourself while trying to hide your identity”) displayed in the vitrine. The quote by the artist comes from the digital book do it (2004) by Hans Ulrich Obrist, developed in collaboration with e-flux. do it is an exhibition conceived by Obrist in 1993, based on artists’ written instructions that can be realized differently each time they are enacted, revealing the nuances of human interpretation. The installation is an invitation to provocatively engage with our own consciousness, with the obliqueness of the self, and with the intimate act of hiding parts of ourselves.

La lettre volée is a deceptively discreet work : a postcard cut and partially embedded in the corner of a wall, as if trespassing on the architecture itself. Hidden in plain sight, the postcard sent from Paris to Buenos Aires reveals only fragments of the information it carries, whether the address or the stamps, embodying the contradiction between intimacy and exposure, memory and circulation, permanence and disappearance.

Throughout the exhibition, dialogues multiply, echoing and mirroring one another across the works. L’espion, a cubic structure made of bricks, invites the viewer to enter and observe the exhibition from an apparently protected vantage point. Through the floating bricks, one can spy on the surrounding space in a voyeuristic and intimate act. Yet this position reveals itself to be illusory. The work operates like a panopticon - an 18th - century ideal model of surveillance that allows those in power to observe without being seen. Here, however, while spying, one becomes the object of sight. The see-through walls and the visible lower part of the body expose the observer, exploring the dynamics of power and transforming surveillance into vulnerability.

At the center of the space, Sur la table presents a sculptural enigma structured around an invisible core. Six identical tables interact in such a way that what should be “on the table” remains concealed. The work rests on only three legs and maintains a deliberately unstable balance, highlighting the tension between what physically supports its stability and what, on a conceptual level, remains absent and inaccessible. Here resonates a subtle echo of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Metrocubo d’Infinito (Cubic Metre of Infinity), resonates here, suggesting infinity not through volume, but through what cannot be accessed.

Unfolded along the long wall, Les vagues is an installation composed of forty-nine framed circular paintings arranged across four levels. Together, they reproduce the keyboard of an old Remington typewriter, recalling the rhythm and movement of waves through their disposition. Letters and symbols gradually fade away from top to bottom, revealing the impossibility of language to grasp reality in its entirety.

The watercolor Punaise jaune is based on a photograph in which a semi-transparent pin appears to hold only its own shadow, while a glimpse of its color can be perceived. Reinforcing the tension between presence and absence, the unpredictable behavior of watercolor introduces chance into the work.

In Aide-mémoire, Jorge Macchi focuses on the subtle trace left by a picture frame after years on a wall. The image is gone, yet its ghost remains : a square darker than the wall itself. A stretched cable connects the shadow of the absent frame to the screw that once supported it, suggesting a migration of meaning from the object to its residue, from presence to memory, from the superfluous to the essential.

Through absence, interruption, and quiet displacement, Jorge Macchi confronts the viewer with the instability of meaning and the transitory nature of experience. Navigation privée does not offer conclusions; instead, it opens a space where observation becomes an act of creation, and where what disappears continues, paradoxically, to exist.

About the artist :

Jorge Macchi is a visual artist born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1963. He studied art at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires and continues to live and work in Buenos Aires.

In 2001 he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He had three major retrospectives of his work: Perspectiva at MALBA Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires, in 2016, curated by Agustin Perez Rubio, Music Stand Still at S.M.A.K the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent, Belgium in 2011 curated by Thibaut Verhoeven and The Anatomy of Melancholy at Santander Cultural, 2007, Blanton Museum, 2007 and CGAC, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, 2008, curated by Gabriel Pérez Barreiro.

He represented Argentina at the Venice Biennial in 2005 with the work La Ascensión, in collaboration with Edgardo Rudnitzky, Palazzo Palagraziussi (Antico Oratorio San Filippo Neri).

Other solo shows : La Cathédrale engloutie, Musée Cantonal de Beaux Arts, Lausanne, (2020), Lampo, NC Arte, Bogotá (2015); Spectrum (Choix d’œuvres 1992-2014), curated by Philippe Cyroulnik, Montbéliard, France (2015); Prestidigitador at MUAC, México DF (2014); Container at MAMBA, Buenos Aires (2013); Container at Kunstmuseum Luzern, (2013); Last Minute, in collaboration with Edgardo Rudnitzky, Pinacoteca del Estado de San Pablo (2009).

He took part in group exhibitions: La Fabrique du temps curated by Céline Neveux, Musée de la Poste, Paris, 2025; Triennale de Beaufort, curated by Els Wuyts, Beaufort, Belgium, 2024; Argentina. What the Night Tells the Day, curated by Andrés Duprat and Diego Sileo, PAC, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, 2023; The Double : Identity and Difference in Art, since 1900, curated by James Meyer, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2022; Seeing and Perceiving, King Abdul Aziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, 2021.

He took part in the Biennials of Liverpool 2012, Sydney 2012, Lyon 2011, Istanbul 2011, Auckland 2010, New Orleans 2008, Yokohama 2008, Porto Alegre 2007, São Paulo 2006, Venice 2005, Prague 2005, São Paulo 2004, Istanbul 2003, Porto Alegre 2003, Fortaleza 2002 and Havana 2000.