Mario Schifano - Pseudo-field

Flowers, or plants in general, as independent subjects, began to appear in still lifes, a genre that emerged in the early 17th century. Subsequently, painters, especially the Impressionists, increasingly focused on the world of flowers and plants, as they offered an extraordinary opportunity to capture vibrant colors and light. Thus, flowers and plants were depicted not only in vases, but also immersed in their natural landscape. While initially a pretext for painters to attempt a photographic reproduction of reality, with contemporary art, the subject of flowers and plants also became a way of interpreting reality.

The work is a clear example of an Expressionist landscape. Nature is interpreted in an extremely synthetic manner, with an almost brutal exercise in reduction. The surface is completely two-dimensional, with no allowance for spatial depth. The lines delineate the forms in a very tormented and nervous manner. Color is used according to an emotional and spiritual interpretation, without any connection to reality. The work is therefore highly indicative of the artist's conception of landscape painting. For Mario Schifano, the two-dimensionality of the pictorial 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 vision of the world filtered through technology. Furthermore, there is another relevant theme, more closely linked to a Pop aesthetic. The images taken by Schifano are always banal, stereotypical, like kitsch postcards. But the artist's pictorialism acts on the massified image, giving a new meaning and a new poetics to what is 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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