22.04 – 30.06.1999
MARIO SCHIFANO – Instant Art – 3000 photography by Mario Schifano
Curated by Achille Bonito Oliva
The exhibition is gathering a series of 3,000 photos, that has been taken by Mario Schifano between the years 1990 to 1995, from images that were transmitted on the television, and then retouched by a marking pen’s or gouache.
In his work, Schifano has adopted variety of process, all kind of techniques which handle with the possibility of remaining in a straight contact with the external, with the fast rhythm of real life. And in this, the artist was assisted by the velocity, by discipline and improvising, by occasion and inspiration. In particular, the television was his auxiliary muse, intense like a continual flow of efficient images in order to structure a total and unique reality.
The photographs which are represented by Antonio Colombo, are emblematic in this way of working, it is a synthetic work capable of bringing into a specific language of the image a series of instance proceedings from another universe technical and linguistic. In a way, Schifano, is an artist of electronic village; in being closed in his studio, through the television screen, the Polaroid, and the video camera, he travels through the world with a velocity that his own body could ever achieve. It’s a sort of a nomadic sedentary that is the wisdom of using the system of information.
With his particular multimedia sensibility, Schifano photographs images of every type of television broadcasting, or from a television screen, that is always switched on in his studio, the image is drawn and refunds with a mixing operation between photography and painting. He works, as always, immediatly, and fast. The photography is passing under his pictorial ability, and then being scratched, stopping in time. The result is a new image, that contains all the daily accident of an instantaneous, flexible, fragmental and synthetic language, like the television one, used and reviewed by Schifano in a way that the figurative becomes abstract and the abstract becomes allusive, without any moral or respectability of sorts.
These works are made of persons, dinosaurs, children, palms, houses, hearts, other prelates, continents, spiders, women, crowd, animals, sex, landscape, and bicycle.
The force of this work by Schifano, is in itself, the evidence of image. In the sincerity and the emotionality of the fast sign, in the artificial form and brightness of color, in the perfect matching, in the use of sequence of normal daily life, in the respect for the occasion and of the external circumstance that defines our existence.
In the occasione of the exibition, there will be some television programs, that were taken in 1994 by Mario Schifano and Roberto Luca Taroni.
