In the age of surveillance: Jorge Macchi’s Navigation Privée at Galleria Continua

Galleria Continua presents Navigation privée (Private Navigation), the Argentina-based artist Jorge Macchi’s first solo exhibition at 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,” notes Galleria Continua. The title, Navigation privée, suggests a double interpretation: an intimate, almost secret journey and a reference to contemporary digital language—‘private browsing’ or ‘incognito mode’.

The art exhibition, on view from January 16 – March 10, 2026, 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'), which is showcased in the vitrine. The phrase originates from do it (2004), a digital book by Hans Ulrich Obrist. “Do it is an exhibition conceived by Obrist in 1993, based on artists’ written instructions that can be realised differently each time they are enacted, revealing the nuances of human interpretation,” notes the art gallery. Here, the work becomes an invitation to provocatively engage with one’s own consciousness and the intimate act of concealment.

In La lettre volée, a postcard is cut and partially embedded into the corner of a wall, as if trespassing into the architecture itself. Sent from Paris to Buenos Aires, it reveals only fragments of its address and stamps, embodying the tension between intimacy and exposure, memory and circulation.

Throughout the show, works echo and mirror one another. L’espion, a cubic brick structure, invites viewers to step inside and observe the surrounding space from a seemingly 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,” explains Continua.

At the centre of the contemporary art gallery, Sur la table presents a sculptural installation structured around an invisible core. Six identical tables interact so that what should be ‘on the table’ remains concealed. Resting on only three legs, the installation maintains a deliberately unstable balance. “Here resonates a subtle echo of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Metrocubo d’Infinito (Cubic Metre of Infinity), suggesting infinity not through volume, but through what cannot be accessed,” Continua notes. Unfolded along the long wall, Les vagues consists of 49 framed circular paintings arranged across four levels, reproducing the keyboard of a Remington typewriter. Letters and symbols gradually fade from top to bottom, evoking both the rhythm of waves and the limits of language in grasping reality.

In Punaise jaune, a watercolour based on a photograph, a semi-transparent pin appears to hold only its own shadow, while its colour barely emerges. In Aide-mémoire, the contemporary artist focuses on the trace left by a picture frame after years on a wall: the image has vanished, but its darker imprint remains, connected by a stretched cable to the screw that once supported it.

“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,” concludes Galleria Continua.