Flavio de Marco | Space and Time of the Landscape
The conversation intends presenting a contribution to the reflection on landscape painting, by taking inspiration from the recent publication of the artist's book Stella by Flavio de Marco (Danilo Montanari publisher).
Speakers will explore the theme of landscape from diverse perspectives in order to present the audience with a thoughtful and articulated view of this painting genre. Bernd Wolfgang Lindemann, director of Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, will explore the theme of Space and Time in Art: landscape as the archetype of an eye-opening vision; Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli, Director of Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome will speak about Space and Time in History: an island as software of Art History styles. The artist will interact with the speakers by relating theoretical and critical features to his formal research. The book was realized for de Marco's exhibitions at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (August/September 2013) and Frankendael Foundation in Amsterdam (December 2013/February 2014) displaying works and drawings from his new project with the same name; the third and last stage of the project will be at Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome in June 2014. The project consists in paintings and drawings depicting landscapes where the artist represents an artificial island, set in the Aegean Sea, by taking landscape paintings from art history and illustrations of real landscapes as models.
The book, created by the artist in its entirety, looks like a sort of travel guide on an artificial island. The text is matched with images/details of paintings and drawings. Most of the book is dedicated to the characterisation of the geographical and landscape structure, but it is also a journey through Western painting at the time of low cost flights (and the new geography of the planet being sketched anew by the world wide web) and articulated by an analysis of the status of art.
Background
Flavio de Marco's research in painting started in the mid-Nineties as the exploration of the surface of the canvas meant as the threshold between the space of the viewer and the space beyond the painting. Then the canvas would represent a boundary of the gaze and at the same time pointing at a physically uninhabitable place. In 1999 de Marco started to focus on the computer screen as a possible horizon of a modern experience of the landscape. The screens are however painted over as empty frames waiting for the image. The computer display then becomes - once painted on the canvas - a truly physical space, a landscape capable of generating a new physical and projectional experience, not less real than a walk in the outdoors.
The space of the screen becomes not only a discourse on the landscape experience but also an exploration of the pictorial space as a plane of representation for a new idea of perspective no longer based on the physicalness of the real, but as a window opened on an unreal world, the flat and closer world of the screen.
Between 2003 and 2007 the artist worked on painted environments, called Mimesi, which explored the boundaries of space illusoriness in the relationship between physical space and the space of representation, through the reversibility of the relationship between the model and the copy.
In 2007 de Marco, in Souvenir Schifanoia in Ferrara, placed figurative images inside his frame-screens: in this work we can see the comparison with the Western painting tradition, through the notion of souvenirs, meant as a sort of tourist-like exploration of art history and a journey to reopen the discourse on landscape painting.
In 2009 (in the London project Portrait of a Collection) the artist started his construction of a possible alphabet made of signs relating to the individual parts comprising the landscape: sky, sea, land, trees, in order to assemble back again the unity of the painting in a sort of montage of diverse techniques.
In 2010 in the project Vedute preseented at Collezione Maramotti, the artist explored the urban “view” as a contemporary visual approach to the landscape: the approach consists in a free language experimentation in the light of diverse sources from which landscape is returned to the world of globalised tourism.
Finally from 2011 to 2013, with his project Stella, de Marco created an original model (imaginary island) consisting in a collage of diverse types of landscape, which is presented as an archetype of vision, capable of questioning the very same meaning of looking and seeing. The island is a sort of painting software from which to draw once again the different techniques to expand the research on the language of painting.
Title: Space and Time of the Landscape
Speakers:
- Bernd Wolfgang Lindemann, director of Gemäldegalerie- Staatliche Museen in Berlin
- Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli, director of Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome
- Flavio de Marco, artist
Place: Collezione Maramotti, Via Fratelli Cervi 66, Reggio Emilia, Italy
Date: Saturday 5 April 2014, h. 4.00pm