Fine young cannibal: Fabian Marcaccio.

Fabian Marcaccio fossilizes painting, preserving its body without admitting tha it is completely dead. He uses the most traditional elements of painting--ground, brushstroke, color, frame--in ways that both acknowledge thei histories and negate them. "What is interesting," he says, "is to demolish painting from within. I'm not a painting lover." Marcaccio's paintings display changing states of things that lack essences. Sometimes everything in them seem to be turning to crystal, as in one of J. G. Ballard's worlds; elsewhere, everything is going soft, as in some of Matta's paintings. "Look at how this splash melts. It doesn't have any identity. It's a brushstroke, then a line." A brushstroke becomes a shape and then starts looking like a support. "Fontana breaks the material space of painting. I'm trying to break its rhetoric. We nee to break our preconceptions of what a brushstroke is." Yet in "breaking" our preconceptions, Marcaccio's critical role is also constructive.

Uccello's now-ruined The Flood and The Recession of the Flood in Chiostro Verde Sta. Maria Novella, Florence, show two quite distinct historical moments within one picture space. On the left, the waters rise; on the right, Noah stretches out his hand to the returning dove as the flood recedes. "In this picture," Marcaccio told me, "time is decomposed, in a way." When these two moments are superimposed, the fictional temporal element at the center becomes irreducibly ambiguous. Are the flood waters rising or receding? Marcaccio's decomposed paintings employ a conception of time curiously closer to Uccello's, whose work look so different from his, than to the action painters'. "The brushstroke has no real time; the elements placed into the ground have no real time." His gestures appear disconnected from the moment of their making. Ruins in reverse, his finished paintings seem both not yet completed and already decaying.

Marcaccio's color sometimes violates the parameters of his brushstrokes; his frames are frequently prosthetic devices, holding together brushstrokes that break the boundaries of the ground, which is pulsating within that frame. Every element in his paintings can be violently active, but may also become uncannily passive. In Marcaccio's paintings you can find everything that you need to make a painting, only not in the right places. Perhaps no other young painter has made such a sustained frontal attack on painting's conventions. But Marcaccio's attack is a loving one, for he loves painting in the way that a cannibal loves fat people, and this very rich medium offers a lot of food, and not just for thought.

The elements Marcaccio cannibalizes--ground, brushstroke, color--remained passive in the post-Modern recycling of painting: "Halley makes an echo of the structure of Euclidean geometry, a statement about institutionalized structures of power. My work is the other way around; it is about structures of power in a fluid society." Marcaccio's brushstrokes break apart, separating line from color, or turn into grids, or burrow into the ground. Squared pieces of the painting run away, slither up the wall, and leave behind traces of paint, as a crawling snail leaves a trail of slime. The paintings squirm or wiggle or writhe. Marcaccio seems not an abstract painter but what he once called "a dynamic archaeologist of painting." In one of our conversations I thought he spoke of painting as a "dummy." It took me some time to realize that he was saying "mummy," alluding to how painting now seems dead. A happily suggestive confusion, for his mummified works are like dummies, bodies without organs. Painting nowadays is an unnatural act.

Marcaccio gets things done without being overly nostalgic. "I am a kind of mechanic," he says. "I come to my studio and say, 'What is the model of this painting?,' treating it like a car. I open up the whole studio. It gets messy when all the pieces are on the floor. 'Let's blow this color inside this brushstroke,' I think; 'let's get this double exchange between a dripping and brushstroke.' I am a mechanic without a manual." Marcaccio's paintings appear ready to come apart entirely, just staving off chaos. Marcaccio does everything you're not supposed to do in painting. His ground isn't the inert backdrop become surface, as in monochrome paintings. This ground, pressing forward, attacks the brushstrokes, pushing its way toward the front of the picture. Rejecting the purity of the monochrome, Marcaccio desires to make "painting about noise and contamination, instead of silence and purity. This objecthood o painting, coming from Minimalism, is so hard to break," he complains. Taking apart the elements of painting isn't a dialectical process. It does not yield a new synthesis. Not that despair especially attracts him--what else can he do except continue to paint? "I saw a handicapped person walking on the beach. Thi person was walking with one foot. I liked this person's dignity. We have a handicapped culture right now, walking like that." Within limits, Marcaccio is an optimist. "I don't like all this art that is being produced that is all abou self-pity, or all this art that wants to teach you something."

"In order to generate a new painting," he says, "I like to talk in terms of the technical model of painting. Everyone takes for granted that you cannot generat new possibilities, but it's not true. You can do something after collage, something after the Minimalist space." His particular problem with collage is that putting two collages together only creates another collage. "Rauschenberg always ended up in collage; Johns went further, joining the elements so that yo could see the whole cohering smoothly." Collage connects elements that remain visually distinct, while Marcaccio wants to connect his elements through "an internal activity that betrays the viewer's way of seeing the painting." He wants the viewer to be able to intermingle his or her understanding of the picture elements. "A dripping and a dripping is a different thing than a dripping dripping. How can you say, a dripping of a dripping?"

Marcaccio's paradoxical networks, linking many spatially separated points, reconnect them in unnatural ways. Sometimes the color inside the brushstroke gets away, keeps going, and goes into the background as the brushstroke becomes shapes. And then, as Marcaccio says, "My work is an example of defective painting." In his art, as in our culture, catastrophic breaks coexist with continuity. Sometimes inert, his painted elements turn aggressively active without warning, attacking each other and themselves. In the '60s, when Michael Fried called some shaped canvases "deductive structures," he identified rational-looking breaks of the rectangular frame. Transitions felt different then.

"Your art," I once told Marcaccio, "makes David Reed's look beautiful." Marcaccio replied, "I never think in terms of beauty. Making a painting at this point is an ethical decision. If you think that you're doing something beautiful, you're wrong from the beginning." Beauty perhaps is another name for predictability, and Marcaccio's work is too fresh in its apparent disorder to look predictable. His photograph untitled (Mondrian with used Toyota), 1988, poses the question: Do you prefer Mondrian's beautiful (but now predictable) order, or a rather beat-up car? Marcaccio seems to be telling us that today we can't choose between these alternatives, even if we wanted to.

David Carrier's most recent book, The Aesthetic in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s, appeared earlier this year from Penn State Press.