Mario Schifano - Butterfly

The work has a marked expressionist vocation, which tends to emphasize the expression of emotions. Expressionist art seeks to proclaim its moods to the world and flaunt them with passion. Formally, this translates into a summary rendering of the figures, through a very nervous and animated line, as well as the use of a violent color palette. These characteristics are found in the historical avant-garde movements of expressionism: Fauvism and the Die Brucke movement in Germany.

The work is highly indicative of the artist's conception of nature and landscape painting. For Mario Schifano, the two-dimensionality of the painted surface is comparable to that of a television screen, a computer monitor. For this reason, his pictorial approach, linked to the gesturality of American Abstract Expressionism, can also be interpreted as interference, an electrical disturbance in a worldview filtered through technology. Furthermore, there is another relevant theme, more closely linked to a Pop aesthetic. The images Schifano takes are always banal, stereotypical, like kitsch postcards. But the artist's pictorialism acts on the massified image, giving new meaning and a new poetics to the ordinary and mediocre.

Mario Schifano was a Roman artist born in 1934 in Homs, Libya. He was the leading exponent of the Piazza del Popolo School. This group of painters met at the Caffè Rosati and shared an artistic language inspired by Pop Art, but with a new sensibility also influenced by the experiments of American Abstract Expressionism. The use of symbols of consumer society, repeated serially, is distinctly Pop, but their pictorial interpretation, whether dirty or textured, or using gestural techniques like dripping, offers a new vision and a different reconfiguration. Mario Schifano passed away in Rome in 1998.

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