MARCO PIEMONTE
My paintings incorporate classical iconography, the modernist gesture, and digital manipulation to create a space where identity and abjection collide and repulse; an in-between space where narrative and history remain unfixed and open.
What was said to be good art in the past was the judgment of a completed image representing a fact or a moment of life, where all its parts and figures were fully depicted and appreciated so the eye could clearly read the story, the colours and all the features without doubts and hesitation. Duchamp later questioned this assumption and proved that an upside-down urinal could have been as good and understandable art as a painted portrait.
In my paintings, I ‘turn upside-down’ classical images, partially completed and assembled on a stage to mimic the classical aesthetic of representational art.
These strange elements on the scene coexist with the white gestural form that overlaps, covers or interacts randomly with these past imageries like a question mark at the end of a phrase.
The white paint anchors the present against the representational space created, this gesture not only signifies the ‘modern’ life with its irrational actions, it is a testimony of the artist’s presence, a sign of his schizophrenic reaction to the past.
Elements from the classical past, such as loyal animals and folded drapery, are brought back to life to play new roles in a personal language of form and content, disrupted by the contemporary ease of computer distortion.
I celebrate the freedom that painting still provides to create forms and relationships –
the playful Game of Painting.
