Invited by Marina De Caro, artist of the gallery, Gustavo Marrone inaugurates this exhibition with drawings from his last 30 years of work.
With curatorship and text by the artist, the exhibition will be displayed in Room 2 of the gallery.
Until June 15
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Drawing as a Backbone and Writing
By Marina De Caro
With the aim of organizing our thoughts and actions, artists—either in soliloquy or collectively—persist in the practice of asking questions:
Where do images go?
Do images have a voice?
Do images move, defining spaces?
Do images invent gestures?
Do images fill voids?
Do images comment on the world, the universe,
the cosmos?
Can images escape every system and generate their own habitat?
Even though we keep asking ourselves the same things countless times, I’m not sure we actually want an answer. We feel, we desire, we live, and we think through art.
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Gustavo Marrone and I share an interest in art—and especially in drawing, or simply in the line and in the emptiness of a white, ruled, or printed sheet of paper. Although we have much in common, our practices differ in the procedures that make images appear.
As Gustavo tells it, he is often in his studio working, tidying up, or painting with the radio on. In that mixture of attention and distraction—between the work, the materials, the outside noise, the news, the murmurs, the street, the city, and his own ideas—certain phrases converge and resonate, becoming part of his work. His ear distorts; it is ironic and critical, and his hand never hesitates to jot everything down in notebooks or on loose sheets—some yellowed and stained with their own history. He accumulates these notes, drawings, exhibition titles, and whims in piles of notebooks that turn the artist into an archivist of his everyday life.
The phrases mirror themselves in images. Many times, a text becomes the subject and portrait of someone who, like him, listens and questions the same phrases from politicians, journalists, and media or social media slogans—only to finally unveil their counter-meaning.
Tools such as humor, confusion, vagueness, questioning, the unsaid, contradiction, and the intelligence of common sense make up the variety of approaches through which he builds his grammar and an artistic language that provokes. Between his drawings and his texts stands the artist himself—like a jester—mocking everything at once.
“Manifestos sustain and undermine, admit and destroy the possibility of the canon,” writes Rafael Cippolini in Argentine Manifestos: Politics of the Visual from 1900 to 2000. It is worth asking whether we might consider Gustavo Marrone’s drawings and writings a kind of manifesto. His work, rather than attempting to translate the intentions of his artistic practice, guides us along a line that questions the reactions, actions, and twists of art—its ideas, its gaze, and social behaviors. More than a manifesto, it would be a treatise on the frictions between art and reality that, while clarifying nothing, confronts us with the facts.
…….
words suspended in the studio’s space
words trapped in the air
words that manifest as they fall
lines that tie and untie meanings
the nonsense of information
the mirror of art—its contractual and affective relations,
from prestige to absence and social invisibility—
he portrays and treats himself as he draws and paints
…..
Why not ask ourselves what would become of those phrases circulating within the simulation of truth proposed by the media and networks—and how the historical landscape and the social horizon we inhabit would seep through our pores. We are who we are—and who we can be. We use this marvelous tool, humor, as a sidestep to look at ourselves from another distance, as if we weren’t part of what passes through us.
His humor hovers over critical thought—at that edge where the unprecedented occurs and where there is no room to install truths; a blurred edge, a hairy or dotted line that allows one to exit and re-enter what seeks to establish itself as a system of prestigious certainties. Critical perspectives that, from within, from intimacy, or from the mountaintop, help us think about art, from art, with art, and for art.
Lucio Fontana writes in his White Manifesto: “The aesthetics of organic movement replaces the exhausted aesthetics of fixed forms,” and Gustavo Marrone could add that the aesthetics of friction will replace them both.
The portraits of the 1990s are works that hypnotize because they live and throb with the line. The work is a subject that sweats charcoal gestures.
Drawing and painting as a calling card: how you paint is how you are treated.
