Leo Marz

They’re born, they shine, a finger forcefully touches the screen and they die. How to extend the life cycle of a pixel that wants to be touched?

*texting each other from across the room* presents three recent projects from artist Leo Marz. Through pictorial, sculptural, audiovisual, and spatial explorations, the artist subverts our usual experiences of digital images and touchscreens, bringing them to a human scale, AFK. Although all the works are dated 2022, this selection shows a long research that has allowed Marz to move freely between iPad drawings, traditional painting formats, social media content circulation and the construction of physical-virtual worlds.

Your Deletion Was Successful is a sculptured image composited by a mural-green screen and a bronze replica of an index finger from a sculpture depicting Mexican General Ignacio Zaragoza. A simple digital touch on the corner –even subtler than a nudge from endless scrolling on Tiktok or when the National Electoral Institute captures your biometric data– disturbs the image, it disputes its bidimentional character and reestablishes it as an object in space.

On the back of this image, a video installation presents the same Zaragoza finger, floating through an urban environment. Old Stories for Young Readers continues the audiovisual performance where a troupe of acrobats construct an ephemeral monument which in turn allows, for an instant, the return of the finger’s indicative function. Through chroma key –the great film and TV trick of invisibility– the bodies which hold the sculpture fuse with the metropolitan landscape and the finger points back towards the horizon. It’s a dance routine that activates the disused colossus, signals the obsolescence of the ideas which it represents and interrupts the corrosion of cupric oxide.

Twenty six oil paintings completed during Marz’s stay at Residencia 797 make up a GIF called A Picture of Social Life at the End of Old Times, the work invokes its primordial form as loose pages from a flip-book. It’s an animation which unfolds over two walls, in which a pair of eyes are seen through a grove. Throughout the show, the visitor is greeted with a new scenery everyday, stretching an ocular choreography along weeks, although it’s originally meant to be under three seconds long, as an infinite loop. In a disruptive timeline, the glance scans the show from one end to the other, as if watching a tennis match unfold or realizing two people are texting each other from across the room.

— Paulina Ascencio Fuentes, Curadora.