Mario Schifano - The Lonely House - DMAG002

Landscape has always been a central theme in artistic research, both as a setting, as a backdrop, and as a subject itself. The naturalistic depiction of landscape has been a major aspiration for artists of every era. Each historical period has offered its own interpretation of landscape, contributing to the evolution of its depiction: first with an exploration of space, through Brunelleschi's perspective in the early Renaissance; then with atmospheric rendering in the sixteenth century; and finally with the depiction of every single vibration of light on objects in Impressionism. Mario Schifano took landscape painting to its extreme, which, consistent with his research, became a powerful gestural expression and was born from a profound reflection on the relationship between art, mass imagery, and technology.

The work is a clear example of an expressionist and abstract 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 brushstrokes 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 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 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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