The Stella exhibition curated by Adriana Polveroni and Angelandreina Rorro hosted at Rome’s GNAM National Gallery of Modern Art presents a large body of works by the young artist Flavio de Marco (b. Lecce, 1975). He uses different types of landscape painting and varies his use of pictorial space as a critical instrument towards modern (multiple) perspective horizons. Stella is the title of the exhibit as well as the title of a series of paintings, drawings and a book (written and illustrated by the artist). And again, Stella is the project of an imaginary island inspired by the artificial island recently created in the Aegean Sea. In this case de Marco gives his island the form of a collage made up of different types of landscapes (postcards, advertisements, real overviews or taken from art history) introduced as an «archetype of vision». The island becomes «island software, a non-place of all possible landscapes (Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli)[1]».
The en plein air portrait technique merges into a landscape delineated in the different ways of observing it, in the transformation of a given objective of subjective experiences of our vision. Experiences that cannot exclude a technological device. The 44 paintings and 30 drawings on exhibit are completed by the book of the same name. Stella took two years to write and was formulated as a travel guidebook written about and illustrating a place that becomes a space to reflect on art.
Technology and tradition, nature and artifice are united on a common ground adjoining the edge of the canvas. The screen and software devices regulating the image (and therefore the view) are interposed between us and the modern world, between the Renaissance perspective and the multi-perspective space we live in in today. The computer screen becomes a «possible horizon of the experience of a landscape, an opening to a new perspective vision that travels beyond the physicality of the real world. Space is also that of painting, a vision that observes the flat and nearby world on the screen before anything else.» Painting becomes «the place for observation par excellence, the space where all issues connected to observation converge» (De Marco). De Marco’s perspective is a «reconfiguration of Alberti’s ocular window», as Adriana points out in the first essay written for the catalogue quoting a statement by the artist that expresses his sense of painting as an «invention of a new way to see space»[2].
Paintings confront, compete and identify with the landscape, returning along with what is invisible to the naked eye, the screen – a window of vision as well as a generator of images of worlds, of perspectives and numerous horizons that open up from the bi-dimensional plane of the nature of their liminal surface.
[1] Maria Vittoria Clarelli, An Island as a Lanndscape Design Software, in Flavio de Marco. Stella, Maretti Editore, catalogue of the show Roma 2014, p. 14
[2] Flavio De Marco in a conference at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia on 5 April 2014 quoted by Adriana Polveroni in her essay Stella, Between Hubris and Fiction, Flavio de Marco. Stella, Maretti Editore, catalogue of the show Roma 2014, p. 41
Flavio de Marco. Stella, curated by Adriana Polveroni and Angelandreina Rorro
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 05.06 – 05.10.2014
Images
(1 cover) Paesaggio (Isola di Stella) acrilico e colore spray su tela cm. 200 x 300, 2013 (2) Paesaggio (Isola di Stella) acrilico e pennarello su tela cm. 150 x 200, 2011. (3) Paesaggio (Isola di Stella) acrilico su tela cm. 50 x 70, 2012.