Fabian Marcaccio talks about Confine Paintant, 2003.

Born in Argentina, Fabian Marcaccio has lived and worked in New York City since the late 1980s, although many of his larger exhibitions have been in Europe, including "Multi-Site Paintant" at last year's Documenta 11 and "Paintant Stories," which appeared at museums in Cologne and Stuttgart in 2000. His life and career take him all over the world, and he works on a scale to match: "Dais past spring he created a huge outdoor project on a beach in Belgium that addresses everything from abstract painting to politics.

Some painters continue to think intently about the history and meaning of painting within its traditional limits. Others leave painting to work in other media. Marcaccio does both. While his fans include many devotees of painting proper-to whom the artist represents its future and continued health--Marcaccio fully incorporates digital techniques into a painterly practice. His content is decidedly "impure" as well, including, as it does, subjects such as protesting crowds, environmental disasters, and pornographic pinups amid the paint puddles.

His paintings (or as he calls them, "paintants," which he says implies "action" as well as a kind of "hybridity") are rarely fiat, discrete easel pictures. Sometime they are large enough to be environmental, as in the Belgian project; other times they are composed of wild, curving structures that hang from a ceiling or stretch from indoors to outside; and occasionally they even move, as in the digital animations at his last New York show (at Gorney Bravin + Lee in 20002). As an artist, Marcaccio is ambitious, both materially and politically, in a way that reminds me of Sigmar Polke--an attitude of scale and reach that few artists in their thirties seem able to manage right now.

"Right now," for Marcaccio, means big, messy art that never says no to a subject matter or a material and then complicates things further by adding the element of time, giving unique form to the all-too-common assertion that the world is changing so fast we have to analyze it as we go.

Invited to create a work in Ostend, Belgium, that would bridge the urban setting of the city and the vast openness of the ocean, I made a 334-meter-long piece called Confine Paintant, which I painted digitally, printing on vinyl, then finished with materials like oils, silicones, and polymers. I worked on-site with the wind and the sand--there's so much sand in the painting that it looks like a Tapies! It's painted on both sides and divided into eight one-meter-high sections, all raised on stanchions to meet the viewer at eye level. There are spaces between these "chapters," allowing you to weave in and out of the whole painting, seeing it against the sea or against the city. My idea was to create a pictorial reality that parallels your experience of walking and seeing.

I had been thinking about how to tell a story through abstract and semiabstract means, a story with episodes and evolutions instead of the synchronic totality of allover painting, while keeping in mind the tradition of religious painting or of cartoons, and especially film, where you have durational viewing. But instead of watching indoors with a projector, the viewer here is in the middle of the beach, walking and thinking, in plain air, like the Impressionists, except he or she is also living with culture. Other artists go from the white cube to the dark cube, but I wanted to go outside.

There are long areas of the work that depict the beauty of water and waves. But even in the most natural passages, there is social meaning: A stroke creates the image of the sea, then the sea comes to bring the tide up to and even under the painting and creates another mark on the sand, and then people come and leave their footprints another kind of mark. A combination of nature and culture. I also wanted to evoke vulnerability--his beach is only twenty miles or so from Dunkirk--the idea that in war, the coastline is the area most open to attack. Confine Paintant alludes as well to the fragility of the ecosystem. You can see the garbage you would find on the beach, dead fish, or the oil from some industrial disaster (it's actually soy sauce) alongside abstract brushstrokes (which are actually made with ketchup). Is this abstract or organic material? All these objects are trash and are transformed and in transition. I like to think about painting as the most open thing in the world. Even pigment has its own reality--in a Ryman, at the same time that it's sand or it's titanium, it's something that's in the world. It is a cultural material as well as a natural material.

I call this kind of painting "complex" or "network" composition: It interweaves abstraction and representation, the digital and the analog. I knit my work like a sweater. You have wool, and then you also have a sweater--the sweater that leaves the threads open, slightly unraveled. All my paintings work against the unitary, using multiple parts or details that never create a strong whole. I want to ask, How can we bring complexity to a painting? How can we compose a painting of hybrid materials in time and space, as opposed to reducing it to "pure" painting or history painting?

Confine Paintant is almost like a crime scene, a forensic investigation. The various marks and objects become a mass of clues collected together, as in later Jasper Johns. People like his work less and less, but he manages to achieve highly complex painting in his late work, beyond the collage--it's easy to like the flags, but Johns's late paintings are an example of hybrid instead of signature work. He makes them bleed a little. The great vein of American painting, unlike European painting, is both awkward and analytical. To me it is hard-core: tough, not worrying if it will be beautiful. Just put it on the wall and let people experience it.

I have never been crazy about the idea of the end of painting. There are certain structures of painting that may die, but painting reinvents itself, plays new games. The challenge of painting for Richter was photography; for Ryman it was the very idea of painting. For me it is the inscription of painting in time; in the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, everything that is important to us concerns time. How does painting respond to this situation? Or to the political climate--how do we map the post-human rights world, where the state seems indifferent to individual rights? I'm not saying that I'm solving the problem, but at least I'm not running away.

KATY SIEGEL, a contributing editor of Artforum, teaches contemporary art history and criticism at Hunter College, CUNY. The author of numerous essays and magazine articles, she has most recently contributed to the Gallimard monograph on Jean-Marc Bustamante (2003) and to the catalogue for the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris's exhibition of the work of Bernard Frize this past summer. Siegel is currently completing a book-length study, Art & Money, coauthored with Paul Marttick and forthcoming this spring from Thames & Hudson, and is editing a volume of Sidney Tillim's art-critical writings, forthcoming from Routledge. In this issue, Siegel talks to Argentinean artist Fabian Marcaccio about Confine Paintant, a $1,100-foot-long digital painting realized and installed on the beach in Ostend, Belgium, last spring.