Marco Paleari

His work takes as its model certain iconographies from the history of Italian and, more broadly, European painting (in particular the Renaissance and Mannerism), offering a contemporary reinterpretation of their forms through tableaux vivants created by pencil tracing. The painting process is therefore divided into two consecutive steps: a quick, incisive drawing, free of any virtuoso impulse, with which he outlines the shapes of the objects and people placed on or in front of the canvas, obtaining generic silhouettes that are nonetheless descriptive of a presence/absence, understood as the testimony of a passage; and then the slow, deliberate irruption of hatching and paint within these shapes, in order to give them a certain form of life, a sort of activation of the silhouettes.

In the construction of these tableaux vivants, the act of tracing deprives the image of its perspectival structure in favour of a two-dimensional staging at 1:1 scale with the viewer. It is a reflection on the immutable forms of art, carried out through mnemonic resurfacings of iconic forms: a rereading of what he calls “fundamental painterly moments”, such as the Pietà, the Deposition, various allegories and pastoral scenes.

But it is also a reflection on the very structure of the painting as a support, imagining the painted marks continuing beyond the conventional limits set by the finite surface of the canvas and the structure of the stretcher. The compositions are not expressed through painting tout court, but through a series of interdependent fragments that invite the viewer’s gaze to a gradual, sectional reading of the painting as a whole.