7 September – 7 October 2011
Italian Cultural Institute, London
From 7 September 2011, the Italian Cultural Institute in London, in collaboration with the Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, will host Synecdoche Vedute by the artist Flavio de Marco.
The exhibition revisits – hence the synecdoche of the title – the project Vedute presented at the Collezione Maramotti earlier this year.
The city view is fundamental to de Marco’s artistic research, which focuses on the experience of landscape through the language of painting.
When compared with de Marco’s practice from the late 1990s onwards, this project marks a change in artistic direction, his work opening up to new forms of representation based on pre-recorded experience: photographs, posters and publicity brochures, maps, seascapes and tourist guidebooks, images from the history of art, chromatic abstractions, copies of paintings.
The cycle of works created by de Marco makes reference to six cities with which the artist has deep personal and intellectual connections: Lecce, Bologna, Milan, Rome, Berlin and London.
The exhibition will present the entire cycle of works devoted to London (a large-format painting and three postcard-size works) and fifteen small-scale works featuring the other five cities.
For Reggio Emilia, de Marco invited the musician Teho Teardo and the poet Paolo Nori to develop their own, parallel, visions of the six cities, their musical and literary contributions being inserted into the volume that accompanied the exhibition. For its London showing, Teardo and Nori’s collaboration will be performed live, in the very same galleries in which de Marco’s works are on display.
On 15 September 2011 exhibition visitors will be invited to experience Synesthesia, with the renowned storyteller Paolo Nori offering the audience his views of the city in spoken form and Teho Teardo on the guitar and electronics, accompanied by Martina Bertoni on the cello, presenting the musical fruit of his collaboration with de Marco, the palimpsest further enriched by some of his other compositions from famous cinema soundtracks. Teardo’s guitar and electronics and Bertoni’s cello call into question their past in the quest for new relationships between tradition and contemporary acoustics, redefining the limits of both.
The event is consistent with the multidisciplinary approach that is characteristic of de Marco’s research on the experience of reality and the reworking of that reality beyond its usual cultural confines.
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