DIEGO SINGH

For its inaugural exhibition, Galleria Macca is pleased to present Diego Singh, showing for the first time in Europe his SON paintings against one work from his ongoing Denim series.


At the front room in the gallery, the SON paintings, developed via an app designed for android cellphones, address Painting as a linguistic topos. For Singh, that linguistic plateau functions dually as access and repression, or as a ground were conflict is problematized via the passive-aggressive nature of signs.

In the paintings shown, Singh uses morphing apps designed for android cellphones to present the results of a series of gestures that allow for a handmade distortion of images and texts, all ranging from musical scores (SON) for protest songs or pop anthems, to queer cartoons or journalistic articles on mass surveillance. The sources chosen are all selected randomly and treated as images, ready to be liquefied, filtered and expanded by the finger’s interaction on the phone’s screen, interrupting their original meaning. It is as if the authoritarian, or perhaps, parental act of painting or choosing sources is defied by a Son, a Son that is a sound and a stuttering.

This new SON/sound/image breaks legibility and produces a semantic surplus, a new version of sorts: as the music scores are defaced, they all become ready-to-play captchas, carrying SON, their new tunes, as the music notes are collapsed into each other, or silences expanded or shortened by the software. This ‘look’ could be seen as the stuttering of a text that becomes an image, and maybe a sign unraveling into hiccups.

In the back room, Singh will present a painting from his Denim series as a break with the reading proposed by the main installation of paintings. The painting, started in 2009 and finished in 2015, titled Jeans Valjeans alludes to the Jean Valjean from Les Miserables. And it seems as if this work is cornered by the sign-like-paintings exhibited in the front room, and, as Jean Valjean, the medium appears policed by its own demand, while considering a generic resolution as the only way out of a type of masturbatory chase. Diego Singh’s Denim paintings were first developed in 2006 as a way of presenting, or repressing, the body and the notion of the body of work over the surface of previously exhibited or published paintings.

SON continues to explore the tricky waters of painting and its archive, but does it from a place where the sources and the end result (painting) are open to the outside and can be seen as a sum of forces unraveling, in search of themselves, beyond the archive-the father-and the phantasmatic veil that appears completely torn, now, in 2015.

ARTIST BIO

Diego Singh was born in Salta, Argentina. He is the founder of Central Fine, a curatorial project based in Miami and Buenos Aires. Previously he co-founded, with Clayton Deutsch, Terri and Donna. His paintings were exhibited recently in solo exhibitions at Yes No Thank You at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo; Unimodern Gondolieri at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles; Bulletproof, at Mendes WoodDM, São Paulo. Works from these series where included recently in: Locally Sourced at the American University Museum in Washington DC; Recent Acquisitions at the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami; Prospects, at MOCA San Diego and Le Ragioni della Pittura at La Fondazione Malvina Menegaz, in Castelbasso. Singh’s work is part of MOCA San Diego Permanent Collection, Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and the De La Cruz Collection, Miami, among others. Upcoming exhibtions include a two-person show with Georgia Sagri, at Central Fine Miami Beach.