Livin’Art Gallery Emersioni

Via della Cervia Lucca (Italy)
3—31 January 2021

Livin’Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition titled Emersions, showcasing paintings by Marco Minozzi in its space in Lucca, Italy, tentatively scheduled for the month of January 2021. This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.

Emersions comprises eight significant works from the Absorption cycle, in which Minozzi pairs highly enigmatic figures within abstracted compositional grounds, mostly submitted to richly hued, tenebristic illumination. Executed between 2006 and 2017, several of these contemplative paintings employ the grid as a means of arranging such figures as the human body, the motif of the egg, the tree and the horse, accompanied by fully or partly legible words, executed through a strikingly painterly and notably gestural grammar that reveals the process of painting and evokes the phenomenology of visual experience.

Along with depictions of instances of the visible world, vastly emblematic and imaginary figural forms inhabit these pictorial spaces, such as the portrayal of a horse-like figure decorated with circular marks and alphanumeric characters, nesting within the second column and third row of Matrix (2013), or the ethereal female figure in flight within the lowermost, fourth cell of this exceptionally intriguing painting.

Highly charged with introspection and amply referential to the history of pictorial representation, these works of Minozzievoke figural and textual instances of the Belgian Surrealist master René Magritte, the renowned postwar Italian avant-garde artists Jannis Kounellis and Fabio Mauri, and one of the most preeminent American painters Cy Twombly, who would become based in Rome in the late fifties. Minozzi has remarked, “While Arte Povera—the term coined by Germano Celant to characterize the unconventional Italian postwar current in art—has played an important role in my practice, my paintings touch upon certain elements of that movement rather than its overall radicality of materials. My work attempts to touch upon perception of the visible and invisible world through instances of cultural memory, signs, indices, numbers and words, but also the puzzles of myths and legends. My paintings are related to various pictorial instances of Rembrandt and Anselm Kiefer, so as to give way to a discourse that is personal and collective at once.”

As three types of signs that are classified as icons (resembling figures), symbols (letters and words) and indexes (marks, traces) appear recurrently in these provocative paintings on view, Minozzi imbues the works with semiotic forms as theorized by the notable American logician Charles Sandres Peirce.

Rewind/Infinity (2013), for instance, presents the viewer with uncanny depictions of the human torso in various postures. These icons of the body are incased within obscure spaces that are framed through highly luminous, rectangular compartments within which the raw materiality of the medium of oil is inflected with indexical marks and lexical signs or symbols that articulate the visual arena. Having restricted icons, or pictorial representations, to a limited selection of locations upon the painting’s surface, Minozzi translates the process of visuality to specific focal points at given moments of the perceptual experience. As the bipartite title of the painting intriguingly suggests, visual representation may attempt to rewind temporal perception or suspend it infinitely. Indeed, the optical experience within the visual field takes place at specific focal points at specific moments of time, systematically punctuated with the blink of the eye that is conditioned by the pulsating body. While “infinity” may imply the idealized, Renaissance practice of painting to a given extent, “rewind” points out to the temporality of vision and the mechanism of the optical experience, with a plurality of medium-specific representational possibilities that have preoccupied practitioners of modernist and contemporary pictorial expressions.

Throughout this series of works, the figures constructed by Minozzi convey a sense of the visceral and elusive, if not the mystical. It is as if perception itself, once investigated, attempts to dissolve and transcend convention, recalling the schism of Maurice Merleau-Ponty when he explains: “We can no more construct perception of the thing and of the world from discrete aspects, than we can make up the binocular vision of an object from two monocular images. My experiences of the world are integrated into one single world as the double image merges into the one thing, when my finger stops pressing upon my eyeball. I do not have one perspective, then another, but each perspective merges into the other and, in so far as it is still possible to speak of a synthesis, we are concerned with a ‘transition-synthesis’.”*

As the title of the exhibition Emersions suggests, these distinctive paintings of Minozzi address phenomenological emersions of perception and lived experiences, represented here through the devices of modernist and contemporary paintings. With all of its modernity, this body of work of Minozzi nevertheless carries a heightened and reinvented sensibility of the Baroque.

Raphy Sarkissian

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