ORANGE BEATS BLUE, BLUE BEATS YELLOW, YELLOW BEATS ORANGE.  

Marisol Malatesta​

27.06.2014 -  21.07.2014

In the last month Marisol Malatesta has produced a new group of works for the exhibition ‘Orange beats Blue, Blue beats Yellow, Yellow beats Orange’, opening today in Maquis Projects.

Malatesta has been consistently interested in the secondary ritualistic activities of life that form the basis of the political and cultural storytelling defining various hierarchical formations. In past exhibitions the 3 activities of meetings, processions and excavations have figured prominently in her work.  

She continues this interest with the exhibition here, and carries it somewhat further related to the space and materials of the building itself and its inhabitants. Bricks discovered in the garden and probably coming from a previously demolished section of the house were carefully selected in relation to makers markings indented into them. These now cryptic territorial statements of ownership and provenance were sanded down by Malatesta to sharpen the outlines, and these ‘signs’ were then taken as a starting point for the formation of new artworks in various other media ranging from painting to performance.  The four original bricks become the founding fathers of a new cultural micro landscape.  

The acknowledgement that much of cultural and political formation - necessarily but darkly – demands rituals that, while creating connections, also create breaks in pre-existing narratives, and the rejection of other peoples or individuals deemed inappropriate to the new stories, is something that lies at the heart of Malatesta’s work. She explores the dynamics of grouping strategies. Many of the figures in her drawings or performances are literally blinded by a structure but continue to act as if they are unaware of the pyramidal cones placed over their heads. Their blindness has not rendered them ineffectual as immediate social subjects. But we do have to ask how this disability removes them from proper accountability in relation to their actions. The use of almost random symbols taken from building rubble to create new cultural scenarios and languages offers a bleak parable of how random the excluding ideas of a civilization’s, a people’s or indeed any grouping’s origin myths can be.