Situations Will Continuously Happen (Part 1), by Leo Marz, the first in a two-part series, offers the vision of a posthuman world in which the experience of time and space has been irreversibly transformed by digitalization.
In this world, the temporal succession accelerated by the dizzying flow of images not only compresses time, but also collapses space: it generates a new zone of perception in which planes, dimensions and perspectives coexist in a dislocated manner.
These canvases are glimpses of that metaspace in which basic orientation coordinates, such as proportion or the vanishing point, no longer exist. They invite us to penetrate the surface as a threshold of perception. Beyond that threshold we will not find an end or depth, but a maelstrom of angles, corners, nooks, spectral presences: the collapsed space in which countless dimensions coexist.
Located at the antipodes of traditional plastic composition, the pieces by Marz appear to us as two-dimensional prisms that refract infinite and turbulent horizons. They offer, indeed, a return to figuration, but one that occurs after the apocalypse of the human figure.
In Leo Marz's imaginarium, the digital reproducibility of images and their disordered flow have acquired a life of their own. Its entities unfold in the midst of the ruins of a previous world—that of human beings—in which some principles that generate form survived: fractured contours that become abstractions, abstractions that become figures, fractured forms. Are they waiting for a new beginning? Are they, perhaps, the announcements of a new civilization?
Looking at these paintings it is impossible not to evoke the Aleph, that space-object imagined by Borges “where all the places of the world are, without being confused, seen from all angles.” But what form could the Aleph take in a world, like ours, in which information flows have taken the place of tradition, and in which conventional time and space cohabit and merge with simultaneity and cyberspace?
Leo Marz's Aleph is the aesthetic sensation produced by that tradition-flow that no longer happens in a space or passes in a time, because it is compressed in the multiple dimensions of a hyperreality. Surreal landscapes dreamed by the algorithm, Marz's paintings are a journey through an area of images-debris that are resurrected as creatures from other dimensions.
Fires, ectoplasms, exhalations appear in them; forms and objects are distinguished as ghostly presences, shadows of significance—the record of a perception of the world mediated by a mechanical and delirious subjectivity.
And here and there: a pair of floating eyes. Looks that look at each other and look at us looking at them—the faceless eyes of disembodied contemplation. They are the conscience of whom? Of what?
Leo Marz's paintings emerge from beyond time and space, but they inhabit the here and now of our gaze. Chaotic and disconcerting, perhaps they are the indication of a strange and convulsive beauty to come.
-Humberto Beck
