The desire to get lost: Marco Mazzucconi

Most of us try hard not to get lost.
When was the last time you got lost, either physically or just mentally?

When you get lost and then find what you were looking for, it can be the most satisfying form of discovery.

It is easy to get lost looking at the delicate images that Marco Mazzucconi offers us. Refined and elegant, Mazzucconi’s artworks appear to the viewer’s gaze with an extraordinary lightness and simplicity, almost impalpable and incorporeal.

Born from rigorous studies and in-depth analyzes, Mazzucconi’s work is pre- sented in different forms and multiple languages. Persistent curiosity and the desire to discover and experiment have led the artist to approach different materials, techniques and themes over the years, allowing him to get lost in an infinite world of possibilities and spaces. And this has led him, just as hap- pens to those who observe his works, in an “other” world, in an “elsewhere”, a “not here”.

It is no coincidence that the first cycle of works you come across while visiting the exhibition has the title “Essere non qui”, “Being not here”: “I repeat this simple Photoshop process on a canvas stretched on the cylinder of a large lathe, spreading the oil paint in large patches, and then apply the brush in a single very long pass, which thanks to the mechanical movement of the cylin- der over time amalgamates the entire surface of the painting and brings me back to the longed-for condition of being not here”, explains the artist.

Alongside these lively abstract canvases, the exhibition continues with two series of works, “Cookie” and “Pezzo Dorato”, through which the artist studied and analyzed the infinite potential provided by the extroflection of the canvas.

The use of baroque frames, wooden structures and polyurethane foam inser- ted behind monochrome canvases (white and coloured) allowed Mazzucconi to create new and unprecedented effects of lights and shadows and to unba- lance the relationship between support and surface, leaving us to imagine different stories from the one the original idea might suggest.

We find these relationships and oppositions also in the series “Informale visto dall’uomo e visto dal cane” – in which ironic colorful painting and their black and white photographic copy are in contrast next to each other - or in “Dimmi una stella” - where numbers are placed side by side and superimposed to in- finity. We first encounter an image, and then we get lost, looking for the detail.

In both cases the result are works that retain the recognizability of the element from which the artist draw inspiration, but, by altering its meaning, material and context, leave the interpretation of the work open. Only the observer, rea- ding the work, can attribute its own meaning to it.

Mazzucconi focuses on that moment of pleasure, of isolation from the daily frenzy that needs to be experienced with the strength of estrangement. The exhibition refers to a condition of a fleeting pleasure, provoking a desire of temporary isolation through the sheer use of abstraction.

“I’m looking for the point where the logic of things can be damaged, the boun- dary where things, while retaining their features, risk losing their way”, says the artist.
His works go beyond a known border, they get lost in “other” place.

And we just have to get lost in his works, in a delightful feeling of disorien- tation, immersed in the strangeness of the new, throwing ourselves into this incredible experience, expanding and reconsidering our definition of “getting lost”.