CORPO 6
presents
Spiegel # 3
“IDEOLOGIE DER NATUR”
RENZO MARASCA
curated and texts by
FABIO CAMPAGNA & CAROLINA LIO
6 december 2013 _ h 18.00 / OPENING
9.12.13 > 17.1.14
tuesday > friday _ h 16:00 > h 19:00
by appointment: + 49 (0) 174 659 8464
CORPO 6 GALERIE
HERZBERGSTRASSE 55
LICHTENBERG
BERLIN
TRAM M8 from
Landsberger allee station
Ring S42/S41
Entrance C_first floor
facebook: CORPO 6
www.corpo6.com
www.fabiocampagna.com
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“Ideologie der Natur” is a double solo project-exhibition by two Italian painters based in Berlin since 2009: Renzo Marasca and Daniele Bordoni. Within “Spiegel”, a project by CORPO 6, working as conceptual frame. Which main reference is the gnoseological approach focused on the interpretation of the friction and the convergence between the organic and the non organic imaginary in contemporary art practice.
The poetics of Renzo Marasca and Daniele Bordoni seems to trace and objectify a contiguous “morphologie der natur”. An indefinite but physical space of research and analysis which is revealing, in their everyday practice of painting, its underlying structure. The ideology of Nature.
The term Ideologie is taken in its more intuitive meanings as “idea, conception, of reality” (A. Gramsci): the mother of the factual. Producing in this way an inversion of the paradigm. Nature identified as a subject is moved by a sharp will (G. Bruno); no more simply an object of hermeneutics.
Ideologie der Natur produces therein an equation, wherein the ideologie, as the idea, identifies itself into the “sign”, the image: the Mundo Imaginalis. Affirming the metaphysical essence of the painting practice (P.Florenskij).
And the work of Renzo Marasca in this sense is significant. Renzo’s approach is very physical. He applies the matter, the colors, directly on the canvas, using his hands. He moves unconsciously, without any previous formal idea, inside the scene - the ritualistic space defined by the canvas’ borders - creating new structures of relations. New possibilities. Different fragmented hypothesis emerge organically trough the organ of the intuition. Defying a metamorphical space of living. An iridescent sign.
His paintings, focusing on the informal detail of the existence, signify even formally – Francis Bacon’s idea of the room as unit of analysis – a vivid and translucent representation of a new locus of introspection and research. An intuitive presence of beauty.
Depicting the ideo-logie of Nature and the sign of reality as a continuum. A celebrated unity. Renzo Marasca exhausts the concept of “history” into a meta-historical representation of being.
The Ideologie der Nature as the true imago of reality.
The infinite being within the continuum of existence.
Fabio Campagna
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Is it really necessary to identify the contemporary painting as conceptual or narrative? In other words, do we really consider as a good painting only the one that put itself in the service of a didactic, social or intellectual thought? Does a painting that does not narrate or philosophize, that does not lend itself to become just a noble version of the illustration or a mere appendage of the installation, no longer have a reason to be? To go along with this idea means to support that part of the critics who says that painting is dead. Still, Renzo Marasca works on this middle ground, a research left unfinished by those who could - and should - be the heirs of Bacon and which have instead neglected all his discoveries on the idea of space and figure in painting, focusing only on the turbid and restless vision of man that emerges from his masterpieces. So, the new generation of painters has too quickly forgotten that at the base of his geniality and of other pictorial experiences of the twentieth century, there was not only a modern human research – moreover already explored by other disciplines – but, above all, a research on the material and on the space of the painting, a research that was supposed to upset the basic idea of this technique, freeing it from the representative function that had forced other artists through the centuries, and giving it the opportunity to develop a new dignity and strength as a solid and complete means. Research in painting, seen in this light, is an inexhaustible field because it overtakes the argument and the thought. It becomes a compositional challenge in which man brings himself beyond what of himself he could describe and analyze. As Gerhard Richter says: "I do not demand an explanation from myself as to why this is so" and talks about his work in terms of experience, of management of the material, of color control. Renzo Marasca is an artist who every day, for his entire day, works on the growth of this type of control and of the management of the pictorial matter. Or he works on himself, on a growth more personal than intellectual, a training that he feels as a need in order to deal every day with that confined and yet empty space that must be continuously created and organized, searching for the form in itself, for the painting as a body and not just as a sense. For the matter beyond rationalization.
For this reason, to talk about "landscape" and "nature" in his work is inappropriate if one does not make certain specifications. Sure enough, his purpose is not to repeat any pre-existing figure, although in his studio they can be found photocopies and photographs of various subjects, including elements of nature. But these do not serve as subjects and models, but as a distant inspiration to build those spaces and forms that, to the demand of an observer in need of something to recognize, respond seeming landscapes. However, the correspondence is loose as much as that of some optical tricks such as the “Kanizsa's triangle” or the “illusion of Ehrentein” that leverage on the needs of our brain to fill in the gaps and create missing links in order to reconstruct in our mind something predictable and known. Seeing landscapes in his works - something that I have noticed to be common - is therefore more a preconceived mechanism of thinking that painting should simulate something. A thought born out from our limitation of not being able to conceive it as a structure on its own, independent, able to reorganize itself in a sense that not just borrows meanings from the outside world. Instead, Renzo Marasca succeeds, by a process of action that, if it had not already been beaten by brilliant minds such as Gerhard Richter and Cy Twombly, it would be even premature respect to the image of art we have managed to achieve so far.
His "landscape" is, indeed, something that is not structured in a solid and concrete form, it does not appear as a geographical object but as an ideological phenomenon in which the matter, object of nature, takes its own stand. Obviously, it is not a political ideology, nor philosophical, nor literary. Many times, talking with Renzo about critique and art, he tends to strongly clarify he is not an intellectual by profession and that he leaves to the others this role, effectively constraining. His knowledge which, in any case, is unquestionable, remains out of the frame, circumscribes it and in a certain sense presses against its perimeter because it forms humanely the person who becomes painter and acts on the picture. But his culture remains outside, does not really belong to the work. The painting is free, indeed, it devoids of any intellectual vices and responds only to its own internal architecture in which the stands taken are not concepts but intuitions about space and about the way to place the matter in relation to nothing else than itself, letting it live its own instinctive intelligence.
Much more difficult is to explain this work how less it is didactic. It is difficult, indeed, to describe that form of wild intelligence that belongs to the artist who works on the body of the painting, abandoning the two roads easy to make and to describe, those two already mentioned at the beginning of this text: the descriptive face and the conceptual one. Once removed these two garments, wearing and outerwearing, an artist who decides not to use them, tackles a full contact fight between himself and a surface on which he must create a new level of perception. Abandoning the commercial position of those who must allow the audience to see in the picture what it likes most, and abandoning also the snob conceptual vein of who must demonstrate he had a very thoughtful work so much that the work could then even not be made at all, it remains a bare effort to understand what the painting actually is. Which sense actually has to take an empty space and try to create out new forms of subtle intellect, rough intelligence, something that is closer to the spontaneous bunching of the forms of life to create an organism, than to the posed, studied also in its transgressions and calculated world that is contemporary art.
For this reason, Renzo Marasca lives painting as a conflict. A conflict between how much of himself must be inserted and how much should instead be hidden to let the material make its own considerations. How much can he afford to reason consciously before that goes to contaminate the work leaving a halo of virtuosism. How much instinct can actually be use before the work loses its intrinsic freedom and before it becomes an outburst of the artist. How much can he take from the world and from art without losing the sense of a creation. How much can leap before his creative ambition loses control and breaks the balance of the work. Sure enough, it is like an arm wrestling in stalemate, where two powers - the artist's and the one that belongs to the painting as part conceived and respected as sentient - push in equal and opposite directions. But not with the calibrated elegance of the physics' forces, as with the animality of challenge between bodies. The result is always a form of dissatisfaction, inevitable in this stalemate, in which the artist feels himself unable to reach that spark of divine genius, the transmutation from a human thought to a purely pictorial one. Yet not succumbing and not jumping to one easier side of understanding art, yet continuing a dialogue on par with the materials, yet governing the construction of the canvas by balancing his own conscience and the one, impenetrable, of the painting itself, distinguishes who is an artist for “manner” and who is it for “essence”. Renzo Marasca, certainly, in my experience, is one of the few artists to be seriously what this role requires: a form of intelligence that abandons any sophisticated softness in order to clash with the body of the art, addressing the painting as an unforeseeable creative means, physical and violent in its rude materiality that can be handled without ever being domesticated in ways that no other language couldn't never explain.
Carolina Lio
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bio:
Renzo Marasca (Jesi, Italy) is an italian painter. He lives and work in Berlin.
His work is based on the concept of error and on the fact that the pictorial material becomes form itself. Each new creation does not ever start from a prearranged picture, it rather follows a series of patterns and reference marks which enable him to sense a formal construction of the painting.
Group Show:
2013: “Boston - Como. A comparison between two different cities within the western society curated by James Hull and Carolina Lio – Como, Boston; 2011: “Preview” Richard Sorge Gallery – Berlin; 2010: S&G Galeries – Berlin; 2009: “Painting moods” L’Immagine Art Gallery, curated by Ivan Quaroni – Milan ; 2009: “Zoomorphic” Guido Iemmi Art Gallery, curated by Chiara Canali – Milan; 2008: “Mondo Liquido” Federica Ghizzoni Art Gallery, curated by Ivan Quaroni – Milan
http://
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“Ideologie der Natur” is a double solo project-exhibition by two Italian painters based in Berlin since 2009: Renzo Marasca and Daniele Bordoni.
Daniele Bordoni's exhibit opening at CORPO 6 galerie will be on the 24th January 2014.
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SPIEGEL is a cross media project by CORPO 6 which investigates - through a collaborative dialogue between two artists – the gnoseological territory focused on the friction and the convergence between the organic and the non-organic imaginary. The specific theme that changes each time, it is defined by the curator. A "mirror" of reflections, interpretations and hypothesis on reality.
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HOW TO GET TO _ CORPO 6 GALERIE
CORPO 6 GALERIE
Herzbergstrasse 55
Berlin, Lichtenberg
HB55 kunstfabrik
1. Ring S42/S41 to Landsberger allee Station.
2. Tram M8, direction Lichtenberg, get off at Herzberg str/Siegfried str stop
3. get in the hof, then door C on the left, first floor.
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The work of art is a place of identity” F. Mauri
CORPO 6 GALERIE is an art project by Fabio Campagna.
CORPO 6 GALERIE focuses, through a series of crossing media and site specific international artists projects, on the examination of functioning of identity topics within the articulation of the city. Taken as a symbolical, political, cultural and sociological reference. An alive body of living contents.
CORPO 6 GALERIE runs a series of performative projects where the music element plays its role in relation to the dynamic of the space and to the open physicality of the body.
CORPO 6 GALERIE is a space of music research and design production.
CORPO 6 GALERIE, a 86 square meters space, is located in HB55 Räume der Kunst, Herzbergstrasse 55, Lichtenberg, Berlin.
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_ You can also read our CORPO 6 Journal - may 2012 / august 2013 -
with all the Exhibitions and the Projects at CORPO 6 between may 2012 / august 2013, here:
http://www.youblisher.com/
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_ F R A G M E N T S # 0 aperiodical visual web magazine by CORPO 6:
9 SCANS - TRACING DIONYSUS by Fabio Campagna
You can see it and download it, here:
http://www.youblisher.com/
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CORPO 6 RECORDINGS_ listen here:
https://soundcloud.com/
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contact:
www.corpo6.com
www.fabiocamapgna.com
fabiocampagna@yahoo.it
+49 (0) 174 659 8464
amalia di Lanno
