Mario Schifano - Untitled

The work draws on a pop aesthetic in its use of famous or mass-produced images and their pictorial reworking. Pop Art emerged in the United States in the second half of the 20th century as a result of artists' interest in and critique of the contemporary "consumer society." All expressions of Pop Art presuppose a sort of double bond with the world of consumerism and mass media. On the one hand, the artwork is reduced to a mere consumer product, thanks to the use of advertising language in the works and their serial reproduction through mechanical processes. On the other hand, as in this case, the mass-produced images themselves become works of art, as a more genuine and truthful expression of the new society and thanks to the artist's recontextualization.

For Mario Schifano, the two-dimensionality of the painted surface is comparable to that of a television screen, a 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 (in this case, a blue sky with an airplane flying across it). But the artist's pictorialism acts on the massified image, giving new meaning and a new poetics to the ordinary and mediocre. Thus, the artist intervenes with a dual register: on the one hand, a pictorial gesturality typical of American Abstract Expressionism; on the other, the recovery of a common object, elevated to a work of art, as in the poetics of the object typical of the New Dada or Arte Povera movements.

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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