FRANCESCA BOGLIOLO

FEDERICA BURLANDO

FRANCESCA CARBONE

"It was a path one had to walk, straight and alone...until one crossed the dark and desolate valleys and finally reached the pure air to linger on the edge of a high and limitless plain. Imagination, freed from the chains of fear and law, then became one with vision. And the Act, intrinsic and absolute, was its meaning, and the bearer of its passion."

 

There is something that unites these words written by painter Clifford Still in a letter to Gordon M. Smith and Andrea Marchesini's action. Perhaps that individual and intimate path that, over the years, has liberated a style that to this day is specific and personal, albeit constantly evolving.

In our time there is determined coexistence of various and dissimilar forms of expression and, unlike what had happened in the twentieth century, there are no homogeneous and unitary movements but individual personalities whose creative value of the ego is exalted. We are in the age of the "egocalypse," claims Vincenzo Trioni, and Marchesini's work is concrete proof of this.

Marchesini delves into the interstices of the present, into a complex, layered and elusive temporality that is not approached as an obstacle or barrier but as an extraordinary challenge and inspirational opportunity. He composes the contours of its appearances, does not shirk, shows implicit roots and unexplored intentions. Seemingly unspecified forms speak with some precision of what the creative perceives. They coincide with what is outlined in front-and then erased. From the way the figures emerge and fade, distance and juxtapose with one another, one senses an expansive web of forces, a continuous questioning of the subjects' assertion. It is the configuration of a sensation, the natural growth of the need to express in form and color the prism of imagination.

The canvas in front of us thus possesses an overtly autobiographical value; Marchesini speaks to us of his "I" openly. A perturbed feeling is perceptible that, without a prejudiced approach, is concealed by the use of garish color. Green squares, pink shapes, bright yellow backgrounds and precious fabrics build up works in which there is truth.

They are interpretations, extraordinary and exuberant, emerging in the form of humanoid, alien, fluid and geometric figures that ask to be scrutinized in detail to discover their identity.

His configurations are explosions of mystical meaning that find justification not in any duty of the artist to society, but in what he owes to himself, in his need to make visible the intimate core of his being.

The Marchesinian imaginative world possesses a subterranean sense of pure unconscious revelation. It was up to the Surrealist movement, in the postwar period, to codify this type of discovery and erect it as its own principle. Surrealism fascinated by Freud's discoveries, through the doctrine of psychic automation, saw art as a means of revealing the hidden world of the unconscious.  Marchesini, whose work differs in other substantial respects from the Surrealist painters, evokes some references to them (Miró) along with slight influences of an expressionist nature (Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, Clifford Still). Chromatic forms germinate in images that remain unknown, or at least unexpected to their creator until the moment of their appearance. Enigmatic and complex presences originate to the point of becoming labyrinthine tangles, vegetable, organic and mental circumvolutions. According to the somewhat ingenious observation of the creative, it can be said that he replaces the repressed microcosm with an unattainable macrocosm. He expands the limits of our perception by deepening the cosmology of a subjective and mental universe, through a repertoire of images in which Marchesini retains his own and characteristic elusiveness, as if he has now gained ready access to his subconscious that he no longer has much reason to fear what it contains.

These works are the vigorous expression of his intellectual energy and sensitive perception, the indicator signs are half-hidden among the whimsical painted surfaces. For example, the perfect, flat layering of the background is fundamental basis, a temporary "tabula rasa" from which everything begins. Once the first spherical form is generated, dripping effects are combined with rapid, seemingly improvised brush swirls, branching, dense drippings are extended, fabrics, lacework and, in recent productions, fragments of rounded mirrors are inserted. Forms and materials that in the overall view generate a relationship.

The pure visual aesthetic becomes something else in the eyes of the careful observer. Volumes, chromatic and stylistic details together compose and convey different moods, allude to different possible values: a continuous contrast in search of coexistence.

These are not immediate works; they require time.

Marchesini's is an alphabet that we cannot easily translate but the recurrence of symbols and forms, the result of a kind of obsessive component, implies the presence and construction of meaning.

The canvases are composed as Logos for the artist, a discourse that unifies and collects in images the multiplicity of being in order to find, more than a balance, a logic of existence.

Marchesini's painting witnesses a new vision that describes and identifies the multiplicities of the sensible, obviously departing from achieving a primacy of absolute truth. It stops, however, and emphasizes on the canvas, the aspects of an ever-changing image of thought.

It can be said that Marchesini generates and operates the concept that Nietzsche identifies with Will to Power, the creative freedom of man, the Act that is the source of meanings and interpretations that becomes the possibility for the artist to become what he is. The Will to Power consists in creating, or rather re-creating being to the measure of one's own beyond-humanity, and as an interpretative force one grasps the essence and origin of perspectival multiplicity. Thus, at every moment, a relationship is established between sensibility and becoming in which the main features are grasped and brought out through an aspect traceable to a form. This is why Marchesini's painting style is a means of self-assertion.

In his action, the painter from Vicenza encodes signals, indications and horizonless perspectives of his own perception in the contemporary era, coloring the exuberance of his reactions and involving us in his own spectator-actor being.

Marchesini's work can be said to announce a poetics of the relationships between creatures, imagery and their temporalities. Marchesini's introspective and conceptual vocation is the element, which on a par with technique, makes him an emerging figure of relevant interest in the panorama of Italian painting of our time.

 

 "Truths can be changed." - Andrea Marchesini

Alain Chivilo'

Scorrendo le opere dell’artista Andrea Marchesini si nota come nel suo linguaggio

nasca un legame e un’apertura alla vita. Parafrasando un concetto del critico d’arte Maurizio Calvesi, l’iter pittorico di Marchesini elabora in chiave contemporanea canoni della Pop Art unendo alla simbologia dei mass-media, o meglio della vita umana, filtri visivi realizzati concet- tualmente dall’uomo.

Se per Andy Warhol “la pop art è un modo di amare le cose”, per Andrea Marchesini diventa un lirico fine espressivo, che si arricchisce all’interno della sua formazione artistica in nobili rimandi e originali evoluzioni.

A dimostrazione di quanto indicato, nel pittore scaligero di nascita ma vicentino d’adozione, tutto quello che si determina nel rapporto luce/ cromie lo appassiona fortemente per un’interpretazione realmente connessa ai giorni d’oggi. La forma del colore, vera tradizione artistica veneziana fin dal Rinascimento, lo porta a correlare codici visivi che, sapientemente miscelati,costrui- scono un sistema di comunicazione interdisciplinare.

Dai primi lavori denominati “Trac- ce” e “Materici”, in cui l’istinto espressivo sposa la gestualità alla geometria, creando fluttuazioni di colori e di materia nella dinamica percettiva, Marchesini comincia a dare sempre maggiore spazio a universi simbolici e figurativi che si permeano in una matrice pop. L’ar- tista dunque sviluppa un biografico vocabolario correlato da immagini che, dal suo io, si connette al mondo circostante.

I successivi cicli “Affabulando”, “Satyricon” e “Action” non sono altro che universi della mente che tra luce, cromaticità e sentimento delineano labirinti e collegamenti visuali dalle interpretazioni senza fine, evidenziando la passione per Joan Mirò sempre tradotta con personalità e un richiamo a Concetto Pozzati per quelle figure pop poste in un contesto narrativo, ma in forme più stilizzate.

Andrea Marchesini nella sua produ- zione artistica crea ulteriore vivacità grazie a un fluo ottenuto dall’unione di smalto, olio e acrilici per una maggiore percezione di profondità. Inoltre una rarefazione figurativa, spesso delimitata in alcune aree dell’opera, esprime linguaggi urbani semplici nella definizione rappresen- tativa, utili a codificare diversi piani narrativi dimensionali.

In sintesi, spontaneamente, idea forze espressive che attraverso l’energia del colore permettono a ogni singola storia di vibrare.

I lavori di Andrea Marchesini possono essere ammirati,tra fine 2018 e inizio 2019, nelle personali presso lo Spazio Mediolanum, Arzignano, fino al 26 gennaio e presso Villa Graziani, San Giustino di Perugia, fino al 3 febbraio.

FRANCESCA DI GIORGIO

The Shape of Inner Forms

 

L’arte deve rivelarci idee, essenze spirituali informi.

James Joyce

 

Esistono diverse vie per arrivare ad una forma ed è grazie all'osservazione di forme differenti che riusciamo a raggiungere un contenuto. La strada verso queste grandi conquiste, forma e contenuThe Shape of Inner Formsto, è costellata di profonde rivoluzioni del pensiero attorno a ciò che è fondamentale tenere e a ciò che è necessario lasciare andare.

Un equilibrio che si acquisisce con la pratica, la dedizione, il costante focus su se stessi.

La pittura di Andrea Marchesini restituisce un'autobiografia traslata, un'idea tradotta di quello che l'artista è e di come percepisce se stesso in relazione al mondo: corpo e pensiero nel flusso di quella continua evoluzione propria della specie umana.

Ecco perché la carrellata di tipi, i Frankenstein 2.0 della più recente produzione pittorica, possono già considerarsi antenati della Generation Beyond, una Generazione Oltre dove l'oltre sta ad indicare la tensione continua dell'umanità a superarsi: non seguendo una direttrice gerarchica di ascesa fine a se stessa bensì un senso evolutivo/spirituale. Uno stadio superiore raggiungibile attraverso una fase decostruttiva a cui ne segue una costruttiva. Da pars destruens a pars construens – come direbbe Nietzsche, dal quale Marchesini si lascia ispirare – nasce qualcosa, qualcuno, che prima non esisteva, genererandosi da tessere di un puzzle rimescolate di proposito con l'intento di assistere alla nascita di quelli che l'artista definisce, appunto, “Frankenstein contemporanei”, esseri in continua meditazione/riflessione e in lotta per affrontare il proprio percorso di crescita.

Ecco perché, una volta ritenute concluse, l'artista dispone in circolo le sue opere, si pone di fronte a loro, le osserva e le chiama per nome. Presenze, a volte, dai connotati fisici evidenti, occhi e bocche iperdefiniti, altre solo accennati, profili di volti, contorni, sagome di corpi umani e animali.

«Tutto ciò che è profondo ama la maschera» direbbe Nietzsche «dammi una maschera, ti prego, una maschera ancora».

Assistiamo, dunque, ad una rassegna di personae, che sfilano come in una parata: sono “una, nessuna e centomila”. L'incontro con ognuna passa attraverso il filtro di forti accostamenti cromatici, di colori pieni ed accesi, componente letteralmente basilare nel lavoro di Marchesini. L'opera viene costruita dal fondo, spesso a smalto, per poi procedere per stratificazioni successive di diversi pigmenti ad olio o ad acrilico, preparati dall'artista stesso seguendo antichi procedimenti, partendo dal pigmento in polvere.

Non ultima arriva la materia che, parallelamente al colore, lavora su un piano diverso ma complementare, proprio come accade tra astratto e figurativo che si compenetrano in un tutt'uno indissolubile all'interno delle tele.

Tessuti di varia provenienza come trapuntati, juta, lana, ecopelle, velluti e broccati cuciti assieme diventano un pattern visivo capace di imprimere un ritmo modulare all'opera interagendo per analogia e contrasto con il resto della composizione.

Il cerchio si chiude, ritornando alla forma quella ricercata e raggiunta da Andrea Marchesini: «un’idea che diventa “immagine”, una visione filtrata dalla psiche, una visione deformante che astrae la realtà esteriore interiorizzandola».

Così, The Bow (L'Arco), l'opera che apre la monografia, è idealmente un varco. L'artista, lasciandosi guidare dalla percezione soggettiva della realtà, riconosce una figura centrale che si inchina con qualcuno sulle sue spalle: si sta inginocchiando come per rendere omaggio alla natura, al Tutto.

La posizione del suo corpo forma un grande oculo rosso. L'occhio, non a caso, era, per gli antichi greci, un simbolo apotropaico di protezione e richiamo ad energie positive. Per noi, ora, è un'apertura verso una dimensione nuova.

A traghettarci in questo inedito viaggio non può che essere il rosso predominante di The Bow, tra i colori preferiti di Andrea Marchesini e da cui inizia la successione cromatica di Generation Beyond. Inseguire il colore per l'artista significa assecondare la sua "immaginazione attiva", far fluire le immagini che provengono dal suo inconscio.

Per la psicologia analitica junghiana esiste una corrispondenza tra colore e tipo psicologico: l'azzurro è il pensiero, il giallo l'intuizione, il verde la sensazione, il rosso il sentimento...

Rosso è il libro di Carl Gustav Jung, il Liber Novus (dal latino "Libro Nuovo") un volume “risorto” dopo anni di oblio e composto da parole e immagini, nucleo del pensiero dello psichiatra svizzero, riproduzione simbolica di «un universo popolato di immagini interiori nate da forze psichiche autonome che solo attraverso un corpo a corpo con l'inconscio è possibile neutralizzare e incanalare in un percorso terapeutico».

E se il colore fosse come per Jung uno strumento?

Marchesini ha interiorizzato questo concetto ed è come se davanti ad una sua opera ci

 

 

MARIA LUCIA FERRAGUTI

Andrea Marchesini travels a personal path in his painting. He paints images governed by tension, by his thought and by courage, always consistent with his conscience, with a continuous flow of unity between life and art, fidelity and intense industriousness over the years. The painting presents itself as a moment of conquest, of intense poetics and of inexhaustible visual memory while it also delivers absolute form, linked to the present and to the values of the past.  It is also true that Marchesini passed recent years sustained by the enthusiasms and strengths acquired through travelling, learning and painting, initially preferring abstract forms and, more lately, images that are mainly figurative.

   There is always a subtle tension in him, a constant commitment nourished by anxiety that only painting can tame, an aspiration that is never sated to transfer into quotidian fervour and to placate and evolve finally in the completed work. As Nietzsche said, "Every man, every artist, every step that he ascends to the tower of perfection is due to the struggle he fights with a demon, not with an angel, as has been said, nor with his muse. It is necessary to make this fundamental distinction for the roots of the work." Over time the paintings that derive from this tension reconnect with memories of classical readings. These are similar in importance to paintings from sources that are rooted in the inexhaustible wealth of myth, and therefore return perennially to the past of primitive figures and to those with archaic forms. He translates anthropomorphic and geometrical images and details that lead back to forms that are recognisable in gigantic narratives, in an effective synthesis and laid out in a colour that is permeable to light.

   This fever has always been poured into the various creative moments from his works – on canvas and sometimes on paper – to the progressive evolution of his various personal shows, one after another, also in paintings on an extraordinary scale.

However even if he recently incorporates suggestions derived from Miró's art into his paintings, he never changes that mark of originality and of autonomy that is specific to his own creativity.

   Marchesini continues moving forward with great concentration and has extended his creative adventures in recent times. He opens up to the renewal of the elements of painting; he launches an essential vision with concentric chromatic discs, those discs that insert themselves one on another and become clearly defined forms in flatly extended surfaces with intense chromaticism that are mediated so that they almost appear inevitable without any illusion of depth; he restores design.

  He reveals new possibilities for colour, invented, secret, with new properties and chromatically concentrated. He also reserves particular attention for the human figure which opens the way to dreamy visions, putting it into relief and movement so as to introduce dynamism and, even more, committing it to measuring itself in space that is it charged with energy and contemporaneity.

GIORGIO GRASSO

Andrea Marchesini's artistic probing presents itself as a sensorial path that goes beyond both the figure and abstraction towards an undefined horizon that even evades the confines of the self and of its direct perception. His works are shaped by an engaging dynamism that springs from the profound reflection that the artist dedicates to the various levels of consciousness that can be identified in the finished picture. There is therefore a gradual ascent in Marchesini's creative process that allows him to establish a direct dialectic with the work itself to the point that it assumes the identity of the artist's primary self. In fact his works are fragments of a profound soul, a seeker of truth and mendacity, of real and spiritual, of form and abstraction ... of those contrasts, therefore, that create something that had never existed before.

"Transcendental" could be the definition of his research, intending the term as "going beyond", surpassing the misleading appearance of the mundane image in order to seek infinite places that are detached from the concept of time: creative spaces drained of those limits of the real that are stretched towards continuous and contorted development.

The aesthetic is another of Marchesini's fundamentals: he has made symbols and forms that are common in the awareness of all of us into his own,  realising them through a process of synthesis that has permitted the "figures" to stand out from the background through strong chromatic contrasts. The development and definition of a personal pictorial manner propose a difficult process that has taught the artist the importance of "removing", i.e. simplifying a path in order to render it more intimate. And so it is that human figures appear, reduced to black silhouettes that stand out against vivid chromatic contrasts, self-portraits that seem to be defined by subtle contours ... The epicentre of all of this is always humanity along with its controversial beauties, its innate spirituality and its capacity to be excited: the work, in fact, is often based on portraying emanations generated by mankind and, in particular, by the artist himself.

Another two fundamental aspects of Marchesini's art are: irony in the play and use of materials. With the "irony of play" I intend to define one of the multiple significant planes of the work that identifies itself with  that more playful side, namely those smiling forms that are often attributable to animals and humans that guide the seriousness of the work towards a more instinctive and childlike approach. The materials in this work on the other hand assume a strong symbolic power that dictates a relationship between observer and work that is not limited to sight, but also considers touch. This can be seen in Marchesini's use of chalks, paints and colours created in the studio that allow the artist to embrace nuances that are "warm", not from the chromatic but also from the sensorial standpoint.

What we are looking at with Marchesini is a new and conceptual foundation that endows him with that recognisability that every artist needs if he is to establish himself in the contemporary.

 

GIOVANNA GROSSATO

BY ADDITION AND REMOVAL

 

Until a few years ago Andrea Marchesini's painting was characterized by a triumph of glittering material, with works in which the layer of colour – complex, emotively dynamic and distributed with sanguinary generosity – constituted the most specifically expressive part of his language.  All objective and naturalistic references were totally excluded from these paintings and abstraction dominated undisturbed thanks to intense ceaselessly moving accumulations.

Then this chromatic eloquence underwent a pause for reflection with the decantation and sedimentation of all the thought and emotion that it had generated. This occurred without abandoning the past however and, indeed, the germinal stage – including that of its subsequent and current path, its elaboration – is represented by these efforts that in certain ways are primordial and pragmatic.

The rarefication of the chromatic impasto, stripped from the canvas, fulfilled the artist’s desire to take back ownership of the form. Now colour has been given a co-starring role and, treated using experimental techniques, has effectively assumed the function – also extremely important – of acting as "backcloth" and as "container" for a variety of elements that were not only gradually defining themselves in fundamentally surrealist terms but also occasionally "quoting" some of the stylistic traits of one of Marchesini's artists of reference, Joan Mirò.

It is specifically on this surrealist matrix that Andrea Marchesini's path has been allowing other tensions to mature, ones that are in some ways more subtle and interiorizing, with the insertion of anthropomorphic, phytomorphic and objectual traces without hierarchical competition. All this occurs with particular reference to symbols of civilization interconnected by the common denominator of human processing of the spirit and of thought. Even writing is used as an aesthetic sign, beyond its communicative value, and as a bearer of processes of abstraction, of formalization, of logical construction, of analysis, and of synthesis and therefore capable of allowing the formulation of new hypotheses and new theories, as well as the classification of tangible and intangible worlds.  To put it succinctly, Marchesini employs their graphemes as design and artistic elements, and liberates the writing from its consecrated and extremely ancient purpose.

To some extent scion of the Transavanguardia, the current so-defined by Achille Bonito Oliva in 1979 that arose in Italy in the seventies after the experiences of Arte povera and of Minimal art, the artistic procedures of those years like those of Marchesini recover figurative painting and drawing with a view to rediscovering a language that would be capable of greater openness and expressive freedom and also of restoring the importance of technical intensity in the construction of a painting.

But in the large and vast canvasses that unfold their "stories" there is also something closely linked to the contemporary of course, in the recovery not just technical but also cultural and religious. And not just and not solely as regards the style, but especially the themes and ideas practiced by various artists of reference among those of the eighties mentioned who, in addition to the Italian exponents of the Transavanguardia, such as S. Chia, F. Clemente, E. Cucchi, N. de Maria and M. Paladino, revolutionized the foundations of pictorial language in the United States too.

And indeed these protagonists of a brief but intense season rooted in New York's East Village constitute the other precious benchmark for Marchesini. Jean-Michel Basquiat, in particular, who with the graffiti artist Keith Haring and conceptual artist Mike Bidlo, installed himself in this neighbourhood at the beginning of the eighties. However for Marchesini the suggestion does not simply refer to the anarchic and liberating attitude to expression but also to a more thorough investigation into the symbols – including for example the crown that Basquiat uses as a stylized signature, along with others, in his works on canvas – and in which the artist finds again the meanings of a culture and of a generation. In all cases the symbols also have an absolute value that does not belong to time: the figure of the "door", for example, often present in his paintings, pregnant with a rich and broad range of connotations: literary, psychoanalytical and liturgical ones common to both Eastern spiritual traditions.

And of course this "return to painting" was also a resounding success in America, acclaim that was also decreed and confirmed in pragmatic terms by the New York galleries and by the international market which once again started looking at figurative work with renewed interest and in which the protagonists themselves established themselves belatedly when they were on the brink of physical collapse as a result of drugs or AIDS.

But perhaps the most interesting element of this reconciliation with painting in the proper sense and with a greater precision of the form is that it puts itself forward as free territory, eclectic and timeless; a place of sublimation of the most topical and most ancient of cultures, a marriage of East and West, of North and South, in which the paternity of the legends, of the cosmogenesis and of the anthropogenesis is so remote that it becomes traceable back to a solitary source, a single territory, a primordial pangea in which the rivers that burst out into a sole panthalassa flow in a lattice of courses.

In fact, in Marchesini's recent painting the images of different ages and provenances represent the arbitrariness of the historical sequence: every layer of the past is a window through which other ones, present and mythical, are seen. The use of different pictorial techniques also represents an artisanal type of attraction: almost always obtained starting from pigments that are then mixed by the artist himself in non-traditional mediums, the tints quite frequently generate interesting conflicts and permit the realization of marbled grounds and psychedelic effects.

And of course in this new formal research phase, the connections to the most important cultural, historically and geographically distant contents are a characterizing element. In his paintings – enormous mobile tapestries or canvasses fixed in frames – Marchesini manages to make the human and the divine, the mysticism structured in religions and the primordial force of ritual cohabit.

The thinking/living ego is then always a constant presence, latent or revealed, which emerges or discreetly secludes itself in Marchesini's figural universe. As silhouette or as faceless head, the artist participates in the liturgy of the painting, almost as if to render even more evident and manifest his desires for the absolute, for contemplation beyond the logical thought and structured reality.

He constructs and then settles in this sort of Neverland studded with hints. Just as "all is hint before being a phenomenon in the cosmos of the limits: the fainter the hint, the more it acquires sense as it indicates an origin. Assumed as origins, all the hints seem to continuously and tirelessly trigger the story" (Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace, 1957), and in the same way, in Marchesini's painting today it is possible to glimpse – never completely expressed, but present in filigree – the trace of the narration, the thread, not red but timeless, on which various fundamentals of human existence append themselves in rhapsodic fashion.

Why not "fil rouge"? "Red line" is an expression of seafaring origin meaning "guiding thread" for unravelling a ship's hawser, the red line salors followed that made it possible to separate the tangled cables from one another. Instead, Marchesini proposes, to himself before all, the vision of a total "Dreaming conscience", the opening and internal amplification of which prevent both alienation and solipsism.  In it the events that are ringed by History are excluded in order to leave space to a continuous flow that has no precise temporal confines: it moves like a powerful succession of inspiration and expiration, with a cosmic rhythm that is transliterated in the colour.  Colour acts as an amniotic fluid in which forms representative of the Ego and of the World move in an endless attempt to define its own moral and aesthetic awareness. Suggested in this search are indications similar to those provided by a renowned Daoist text, the Lieh Tzu which was included in the imperial library as True Classic of Simplicity and Vacuity between the V and IV centuries BCE: "He who takes exterior journeys seeks completeness in things, he who gives himself to interior contemplation finds sufficiency in himself" (Lieh-tzu, IV, 51.).

But the painter is also profoundly a man of his time and his poetic assumptions – as well as stretching out towards the mystic and interiority – are profoundly associated with the anxieties that pervade modernity. They are powerfully bonded to the urgings of the nomadic creativity of languages, and – as Bonito Oliva writes – adopt the "possibility of transiting freely in every territory without any exclusion, with cross-references that are open in all directions. [the artists] operate in the mobile field of the transavantgarde, understood as a crossing of the experimental notion of the avant-garde, in line with the idea that every work presupposes an experimental "dexterity", the artist's surprise vis-a-vis a work that no longer constructs itself in accordance with the anticipated certainty of a project and of an ideology, but rather forms itself before the ideas and under the instinct of a hand that digs into an imaginary made of an incarnation between idea and sensibility ...". (La Trans-avanguardia italiana, Flash Art 92-93, October-November 1979).

What Andrea Marchesini recovers from the recent past is a redeeming and vital "transit" and testifies that not only does the search not have an end or limits but is able to look back and interiorize that Spirit of Time that permeates history.

GIULIANO MENATO

A young artist who feels the vocation of painting to be overpowering must measure himself daily with his precious brushes in order to master a discipline that consciously demands ownership of expression. Andea Marchesini – a Vicenza painter still in his youth – has achieved an enviable maturity in giving accomplished form to his creative gift. His formal approaches – unconstrained by generic classifications – respond to an absolute inventive freedom. Definitions such as informal painting – used in order to allude to images made up of signs, gestures and matter, that express only themselves – are of little concern to him.  Instead he looks with interest on artists with whom he feels an affinity – Basquiat, for example, a graffiti artist charged with interior motivations. He assails his fantastic depictions with a light that is all his own, antinaturalistic, that strips them of all the predictably obvious A spatial structure with an illusionist matrix such as his demands extremely free gestural expressiveness, new chromatic and material impastos, and does not entail a renunciation of emotively charged pictorial formulation procedures.

Marchesini is not interested in painting society, or even painting Art.  He wants to paint as an act of redemption and liberation of every political, aesthetic and moral value.  He does not intend to change the world but instead lets his painting be one. From a solitary standpoint he discovers his own salvation in action: doing stripped of history, goals, ethical impulse.  His values do not configure themselves as an expression of a reality, but rather as an aspiration towards a catharsis, the redemption of a suffered existential unease. The inalienable values of painting are crucial. It is not enough for him to depict a reality of fantasies, of dreams or of memory but needs that reality to identify with painting and the painting itself to become the reality of sentiment.

In his recent work he reduces the colouristic ardour of the Fauves and placates the savage brush strokes of the CoBrA movement but does not dampen the spark within the matter, does not suppress the dynamism of the sign. It is singular to note that the artist's extraordinary pictorial skills in the evolution that his work has undergone in recent times have not been sacrificed in the slightest to the needs of a poetic which has gained ground in the meantime with the demand for legitimisation, not only at the level of the image but also at that of the colour, in line with the most solid tradition of the recent past. Subtly surreal narratives that surface from consciousness without any determined order develop on his large canvasses which have the magnificence of old tapestries and the freshness of modern murals.  The uncontainable energy, once expressed in the swirling movement of the sign, makes way for more meditated formal equilibriums.  Mental state and psychological condition merge in images that work on the visual data and realise a sort of fantastic architecture that brings together all the vibrations and emotions that are inherent in the execution of the work.

Far from appropriating himself of the poetics of cultural nomadism and stylistic eclecticism, Marchesini remains a poet of spontaneous creative freedom who is allergic both to rational vigour and instinctive abandonment, played out on distortions and brilliant colourings, but on the emotive thread of mental abstraction. By adding Basquiat's instinctive transports with Rothko's rationalism it is possible to understand how a fragmentary syntax with quotations of the imaginary, like his, can develop in an open and luminous pictorial space where the figures float above the same colour from which they had originally sprung.

DANIELA PRONESTI'

Pur richiamando l'elemento dinamico-gestuale del suo fare pittorico, la parola “action” in questo caso non si limita a descrivere il solo fattore stilistico né lo slancio vitalistico tout court. Si tratta, invece, della manifestazione di un processo ben più profondo, vicino nel significato alla praxis aristotelica, vale a dire un’azione in cui entrano in gioco riflessione, intenzione e consapevolezza. La vita è azione e non produzione, afferma Aristotele, operando quindi una distinzione, oggi sempre più invalsa, tra l’agire e il fare, e quindi tra ciò che è scelta, pensiero, visione, ricerca di senso del proprio stare al mondo ed agire sul mondo, e ciò che, invece, rientrando nella sfera della produzione, del fare strumentale ad uno scopo, trasforma l’azione umana, e quindi l’uomo stesso, in un tramite e non in un fine. Vivendo in un’epoca in cui i ritmi esistenziali sono sempre più scanditi dalla produzione e dal consumo a discapito della libera determinazione dell’individuo, diventa essenziale dunque ritornare ad “agire”, destando le coscienze dal torpore del pensiero unico, dai meccanismi alienanti dei linguaggi seriali, dall’implacabile ripetitività di azioni subite e non agite. Azione, dunque, che nell’arte di Andrea Marchesini risponde ad una ragione ideologica ancor prima che estetica: «La mia visione - afferma - parte da un evidente pessimismo che si apre verso soluzioni possibili ma indefinite, orientate all’esistenza di un nuovo punto d’approdo». Il fallimento delle ideologie, quindi, non preclude ma anzi rende necessario quel “miraggio di salvezza” verso cui tendono i vaghi residui figurali che si manifestano nei suoi dipinti come latenze emerse dal colore. Riportare la riflessione artistica sul piano dell’azione e della prassi significa quindi permeare l'opera di un fare interrogante e veritativo rispetto al mondo, conciliando l'utopia con la speranza di una salvezza possibile. Aspirazione che spinge Marchesini a ritrovare le origini del pensiero mitico e del naturalismo “ingenuo” dei graffiti preistorici per arrivare ai varchi irrazionali dell’automatismo surrealista, all’organicismo materico dell’arte informale, ad un’idea della tela come campo di tensione dove si compie il rituale segnico - gestuale di matrice astratto - espressionista. Nasce così un’immagine “multipla”, stratificata, dove ogni elemento condiziona l’altro e ne è a sua volta condizionato, in un continuo processo generativo - sempre regolato dal colore - di segni astratti, relitti figurali e metafore naturalistiche. Presenze che “brulicano” sulla tela ora espandendosi in contrappunti ritmici, ampie volute e spirali mai prive di un disegno coreografico ora invece organizzandosi in visioni evocative di paesaggi, parvenze umane o forme organiche. Un movimento crescente e vertiginoso dove s’intrecciano storia e mito, natura e civiltà, senza però, precisa l’artista, sfociare nel caos: «Ogni cosa nella mia pittura sembra avere una mèta, aspira a un ritorno, ad un’origine in cui il rapporto con la natura era di quiete, di armonia, di osmosi». E se lo scopo, dunque, è rispondere alla crisi etica ed estetica del presente ritornando ad una condizione originaria che precede quelle che Marchesini definisce forme minacciose ed ossessive della civiltà e ancora un labirinto di incubi da eludere per tentare la salvezza, l’unica via possibile, quella che l’arte può percorrere, è ridare potere all’immaginazione, unica vera forma di “ribellione” ad un sistema che ormai controlla le nostre vite sotto ogni aspetto. Del resto, proprio l’immaginazione, con le sue articolazioni archetipiche, simboliche e mitiche, ci riporta alle origini dell’uomo, a quella “pulsione” innata che per la prima volta ha spinto l’uomo a lasciare un  segno del proprio passaggio sulla parete di una caverna. Ieri come oggi, l’immaginazione è garanzia di quella libertà che l’arte di Andrea Marchesini celebra come valore imprescindibile.

 

MARICA ROSSI

Ocra, azzurro e viola. Rosa, cremisi e marrone. Fucsia, indaco e beige coi verdi di fronde marine. E’la minuscola parte della movimentata fastosa gamma del divenire pittorico di Andrea Marchesini, il quarantunenne figlio d’arte che, vocato alla pittura dall’infanzia, s’è tuffato nelle fantasmagoriche potenzialità del colore senza transitare nel figurativo. Dal “tempo delle mele” l’artista vicentino è dedito all’astratto-informale acquisendo la caleidoscopica proprietà di stile che la personale ”Genesi e Colore” al Galla Caffè a Vicenza dal 20 novembre a cura di Marica Rossi con inaugurazione alle 18, rivela. Peculiare di quest’arte è l’impatto visivo forte ma mai violento apprezzato in rassegne in Italia e all’estero come recenti trasmissioni video hanno evidenziato. Doti che ora e fino all’8 dicembre gli oltre venticinque dipinti a olio e a tecnica mista su tela o cartoncino attestano svelando sia l’autenticità di ispirazione che la gestazione felice con l’approdo agli esiti importanti di oggi.

Marchesini s’è formato nelle Accademie italiane e nelle scuole di Londra, di Parigi e di Barcellona, acquisendo una spontaneità supportata da straordinaria padronanza tecnica. Ed è come se l’autore riversasse sulla tela tutta la forza della sua creatività, rendendola pulsante di vita e della capacità di tesaurizzare il colore di tradizione veneta, l’oro del‘300, i rossi pompeiani, i blu rinascimentali e gialli Van Gogh. Un’orchestrazione di cromie con sonorità e richiami totemici secondo regole che lui si dà: ritmo, contrasto, armonia.