Project Description
Mario Schifano (Homs 1934 – Roma 1998), Lines
Mixed technique on computerized base on canvas + plexiglass of 52 x 72 cm signed (Schifano) on the back. Work archived by the MS Multistudio Foundation at n. 96/773.
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Mario Schifano’s reflection on the genre of landscape marks his entire artistic career. Already in the early seventies, the exhibition “Paesaggi TV”, held in December 1970, testifies to the search for a pictorial language capable of merging tradition with the irruption of new media in everyday life: in the works exhibited on that occasion it begins to bring back the video images directly on emulsified canvas, isolating them from the narrative rhythm of the sequences to which they belong and repeating them with touches of nitro color in an alienating function. In this regard, Schifano says: “The process is long and elaborate. But only in this way can I achieve the effects of realism and visionary that I run with my imagination”.
Alongside a placement of one’s figurative code within a modern “new objectivity”, attentive to the anthropization of urban space, marked by the increasingly massive presence of mass media, such as film, comics, advertising, the signage, Schifano realizes a series of views, the so-called “anemic landscapes”, created starting from 1963: stories of flattened visions, where the chromatic spectrum becomes poorer and each descriptive element is annulled. In this regard, Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco said: “No sky, no sunset, no panorama; or rather, the ghost of the panorama, of the sunset, of the sky”.
That same sky, absent in the works of the Sixties, becomes the protagonist again in the work presented here, an anemic landscape, executed in 1996, whose different chromatic planes that dissect the entire composition invade the space occupied by the frame, thus subverting the conventional rules of the relationship between work and external envelope. The work presents itself as a swirling impression of an open space that conveys a panic sense of uneasiness and rebellion at the same time, where the magmatic pictorial drawing embodies the disturbing interiority of the artist. The material treatment of color, the violence of varnishing, the voids and fullness created by color clots make this landscape a significant work within the artistic production of a mature Schifano.
