Diario Descompuesto, Michele Lorusso’s new exhibition at General Expenses, presents a body of site-specific works developed through visual research and practice begun in 2023. In his movements between Mexico City, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Zurich, Lorusso has systematically gathered local daily newspapers to dismantle them into their most fundamental components: words and typography. Relying on the analog tools of the utility knife and glue, Michele engages with the pulp materiality of newsprint to deconstruct it, both physically and conceptually. Through the performative repetition of cutting and pasting, Lorusso crafts dense compositions of letters and words across a two-dimensional plane, where layering creates an illusory depth.

The primary manifestation of this process consists of 150 × 120 cm and 120 × 90 cm canvases, each dedicated to a single newspaper title tracked daily across an entire month between 2023 and 2026. In this way, the paper’s geopolitical context and news cycle serve as the foundational premise of each composition—revealing its perspective, site of enunciation, and the immediacy of contemporary nostalgia. Our gaze drifts over a formless sea of information and raw data, presented not with distinct edges or contours, but as a dense, impenetrable mass. This matter of “anti-truth” surrounds us in our isolation, separating us from one another. Amidst such deafening noise, we have never been more alone.

In the smaller 61 × 38 cm works, Lorusso takes up the traditional editorial sections of the press—politics, sports, sensationalism, nota roja (true crime), business, national, and world news—to examine the graphic and plastic diversity of headlines, giving physical embodiment to the newspaper format. In its 24-hour cycles and physical materiality, the print daily tethers events to a tangible temporal horizon—often broader and more enduring than today’s fleeting digital flashes. The tactile dimension and archival weight emerge most vividly in this series, capturing the typographic and stylistic idiosyncrasies of the publications assembled by the artist.

Taken as a whole, the exhibition highlights one of the most vital qualities of the artwork: its objecthood. By transforming reality into metaphor and metaphor into object, Lorusso strips away the abstractions that elude thought and delivers them bare. These typographic portraits possess a fetishistic, near-magical function arming us with our own blades and dusting off our gaze.

— Pablo Arredondo Vera