Marco. Reflections of painted life (Antonella Iozzo)

Marco. Reflections of painted life

A journey of art and memories through everyday mysteries, enigmas revealed by Marco in a discourse that begins with painting and results in the viewer’s attraction to the lightness of the sign, the ethereal force crystallised in the absolute of the vivid substance of his painting.

 by Antonella Iozzo

The most intimate voice of painting is a lyrical profusion of sounds, which the artist known simply as Marco modulates into instants of life suspended on the wings of time.

Time is invisible, transient and ungenerous, but Marco wrests it away from its essence to restore it to mankind in the perceptive liquidity of painted emotions. The face and the body of reality dissolve into an anatomy laid bare. Social labyrinths, geographies of the absurd and human journeys, jagged with violent contrasts, are revealed in the chromatic countermelody that gains the force of emotional tension. In Marco’s work, canvas after canvas, the boundary between the individual and the universal is continually reduced, until, in the amniotic sea of persistence, the subtle trace of an impalpable past remains, whilst beyond the sky, immensity looms over cities of the mind.

“Aurora” (Dawn) returned to the world burns like an organism pulsating with light and energy. The melodic lines of light and shade extend like undulating fibres in the painting’s expanded sense of space. The countenances of thoughts leave their shadows upon our eyes – heavy shadows like solitary sculptures in the precariousness of existence, fragile shadows like the somnolent reflections of the soul. Marco extracts their expressive, communicative force by transporting it to a controlled magma which finds the pure value of life within infinite space.

In his work, he sets out to explore the connective tissue of the substance of mankind. Against this primitive background a vital red emerges, containing the idea of the cosmos, whilst warm colours, from orange to yellows, seem instead to emerge from the void, growing like cerebral fragments that move sinuously like sound waves.

The creative world is transient: an instant lived amidst the indefinable music of the mind translated into the expressivity  of messages that are both inexpressible and fleeting, both unreal and ethereal, composed of feelings, love, passion and respect. Human reductions of nature’s fibre into luminous particles become variations which lead us to think with the body and to touch with our mind the existential spirit of these works. Marco creates them through the ultimate metamorphosis of energy into the physical act; the myriad resulting intersections reveal the artist’s intuitive foundations, and on the canvas they convey fusions that are diverse, yet structured. In an evaporation of content, two strong and strident colours, red and black, stand out against the tonal resonance of the blue of the sky about to extinguish itself in the blue of the sea, a hint of abstraction, a beginning of figuration, and the shapelessness of appearance traces its silhouette in “Moda Colombiana” (Colombian Fashion), the mystery is resolved by the clandestine shadow.

A deep, harmonious, vibrant surface overflowing its frame, the limit imposed by, or perhaps upon, the concept; a border which, in this case, cannot exist outside the painting but is both inside and outside Marco’s work. This is fast-moving painting, immersed and suspended in the light of things. We are seduced by its charms and our imaginations roam in a work like “Cuor d’oro” (Heart of Gold). This is not reality but dream, or memory painted in the colours and the aesthetic of consciousness of Art. On the other side, mankind is faced with itself in the mirror of the unconscious. Never has the spectre of threat dissected the rational order of the universe with such lucid, surgical precision, into geometrical sequences of the absurd. “Twin Towers for ever!” – this is the night with no day to follow it, the night where torment expires in the viscera of impotence.

In Marco’s works, sound and vision attract and repel each other with a synchronism that governs the sign. They are apparitions of forms in the dynamism of light reflected on the background plane. They are almost private diaries, pages that take on the echo of time, whilst nostalgia follows distress, memory follows desire and melancholy fades away in the distance, towards a sentimental landscape, the romantic prelude caressed by a gaze full of affection.

The simplicity of the composition conceals a stylistic maturity and expertise in the use of colour, so the work is shot through with love and optimism, an appeal for freedom and spirituality in painting condensed into dream references, a mental process without material uncertainties and dematerialised in its certainties. A poetic limbo full of existential visions, where perception is entrusted to symbols, an inner light waiting for the change that never comes.

In his painting, Marco is creating scores for space, without boundaries, without rules, without glories, without aspirations; the sense of emotions is the only human resource that in representing the invisible, expresses itself. With great lucidity, Marco translates this greatness. It is a fascination that can restore the power and density of reality to the image. Outside of this, the silent music of disquiet, inside the warm and intimate sounds of pulsating life.

The balance between calm and anxiety, between beauty and its negation, is a constant in the instant we discover on the canvas, a snapshot with a taste of immortality removed from the theatre of Art into a full-frontal collision with the universe. Through Marco’s colours, through his ideas, the way he provides and creates inspiration, through all this, the composition is an intermediate stage between transcending and remaining inside the fluidity of sensations dancing on the painting’s skin, only here the complexity of the thought is simply an extension of the portrayal of truth.

A journey of art and memories through everyday mysteries, enigmas revealed by Marco in a discourse that begins with painting and results in the viewer’s attraction to the lightness of the sign, the ethereal force crystallised in the absolute of the vivid substance of his painting.

In the silent space of these evocations, the seesaw of impressions is a magical movement, around which the modern dream is generated by the creative juices and contemporaneousness appears in an archive of states of mind that run along the thread of thoughts. The effect is a journey scattered with different identities. Marco turns these impossible perspectives into sensory overloads, into the play of signs which erode the succession of forms. This is eventually resolved in the rhythm of a line that marks out the meaning of life, in “Maternitas” (Motherhood).

Layers of culture, drops of memory, social ripples, architectures of the mind, concentric evolutions and segments of horizon lead through the gateway to the East, bringing Marco to China, where he becomes the most appreciated and admired artist. Here, his poetic being takes to the air, like leaves in the wind, in places where the value of time is kept in the preciousness of the present. Marco succeeds in transmitting the universality of his language in an expressive synthesis of forms and concepts depicted like mirages. You have the feeling they will vanish from one minute to the next, but they exude their magnetic presence, a spirit of painted life painted caught between what has taken place and what will have taken place.

Friday 14 March 2008, by Antonella Iozzo   www.bluarte.it 

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