Marco Noris
Profile of Marco Noris published in Catalan in the DiS supplement of the Diari Segre in November 2020 (editorial text, unsigned), in the same issue as Francesc Català’s article Les muntanyes: els cims d’una vida. The copy on this website is my personal archive.
An artist who seeks his own approach, giving another meaning to the elements he finds while prospecting the territory and observing natural features.
Marco Noris (Bergamo, Italy, 1971) works from painting, directing his research towards two main thematic areas: on the one hand ruins and historical memory, and on the other territory and landscape. In his working processes, Noris explores new ways of relating to the surroundings, to nature, to the act of walking, drawing on two historical artistic traditions: the legacy of late-nineteenth-century open-air painting, pleinairisme, and the psychogeographic practices proposed by the Situationists.
In projects such as La Entrega or En frontera, the artist focuses on the concept of the crossing which, far from any sporting or hiking endeavour, becomes a central axis where his artistic practice converges: the prospecting of the territory, the search for border markers (mugues), landmarks or features of the surroundings that interest him enough to stop and paint them, accentuating and giving meaning to other kinds of approaches that the landscape and its history offer him.
In the case of En frontera: 290 km, 25 days, 198 border markers, 212 works. An approach to the Spanish–French border of the province of Girona, along which the main routes of the Republican exile once ran, with the artist himself becoming border; or the project La Entrega, Acto I, an investigation into territory and landscape, and the journey, in which he consciously abandons pictorial mimesis to embrace abstraction, cartography and toponymy, introducing different recording tools into his practice. A project produced by the Centre d’Art la Panera and the Can Farrera production centre (a space recently incorporated into the Arxiu Javelina) within the Art and Nature Grants programme, jointly promoted by the two centres, in which Noris proposes to travel on foot for 21 days, passing through 8 art centres spread across the territory, from Barcelona to the village of Farrera, at 1,300 metres of altitude in the Lleida Pyrenees.
In short, works in which the concept of pilgrimage and the practice of walking have helped him to deepen and experience his relationship with the landscape and the territory, as well as to give meaning to his artistic and aesthetic practice.
Marco Noris lives and works in Barcelona. After leaving Bergamo in the late 1990s, he lived in Ferrara and Bologna and then settled in Barcelona in 2003. Since 2015 he has been experimenting with painting as a medium for developing performative experiences as an extension of his studio work. More recently he has turned to walking as an aesthetic and artistic practice with the project En frontera (2017, Barcelona Producció award) and the more recent La Entrega (2018, Art and Nature award). Between 2015 and 2017 he was a resident artist at Hangar, a visual-arts production centre in Barcelona. He is currently a resident artist at Piramidón, a contemporary art centre in the Catalan capital. He has taken part in various solo and group exhibitions, of which we highlight his most recent participation in the newly inaugurated Errant Festival in the Vall de Boí.
Works reproduced: «A la frontera. Muga 500», 2017 (oil on paper, 12×17 cm) and «La Entrega I. 17 dies II», 2018 (mixed media on paper, magnets, 115×87×18 cm).
- Download the DiS supplement of the Segre (November 2020)
- Francesc Català’s article in the same issue: Les muntanyes: els cims d’una vida