The act of painting
After the dismantling of the genres and hierarchies of modern art that took place in the 1960s, it was quite common, during the 1970s and 1980s, for painters to feel the pressure of justifying their choice of medium. Pictorial practice then worked from irony to the expansion of its limits beyond the stretcher. By the time the 2000s arrived, it was widely accepted that painting could be conceptual and even a medium of institutional critique.
Marco Noris’s work is framed within this expanded conception of painting. While in his 2017 projects “On the Border“ and 2018-2019 “La Entrega“ Noris uses painting as a record of his walking, of his connection with the landscape and its history, in this exhibition he returns to painting in its most orthodox sense and proposes a show with several levels of meaning that move back and forth between tradition and contemporary fluidity (Bauman).
From my point of view, the title of the exhibition is already a first clue to this plurality of contents that his work connotes. “Nel lieve sovrapporsi di cielo e terra“ is pure poetry. The association between poetry and painting is long and well known. From Horace’s “ut pictura poesis” to Umberto Eco, numerous speculations have been written on the relationship between poetry and painting. Over time, these two sign systems –the word vs. colour and its materiality– have rivalled in their capacity to move us and to communicate to our deepest sensible world. But while the poetic character of the title takes me back to the pictorial tradition, it also transmits to me at the same time a fragile and unstable belonging to two different worlds (sky and earth) and informs me about the ambiguous situation of painters in the current artistic context. It would seem that painters have this strange belonging to tradition –through the medium– and, at the same time, are a kind of messengers of “sensible content” within the speculative and discursive research of contemporary art.
Leaving aside the title and entering into the exhibited work, I look at his pieces and again feel the ambiguity and fragility. Noris paints in oil and his compositions are a kind of abstract landscapes. One can sense horizon lines, nocturnal paths, mountains and colours that synthesise and transmit a closed atmosphere of threatening clouds. But my placid perception is disturbed when I discover that the supports of these paintings are pieces of wood extracted from some nineteenth-century ruins; cardboard found in the street and glued in such a way that they look like accordions of different sizes and, finally, pieces cut from old paintings that Marco has superimposed, juxtaposed and combined with various elements, forming true pictorial artefacts. Is this a painting exhibition? Yes, it is. There is oil, there are abstract landscapes, but it is also a powerful revitalisation of the medium. The exhibition is painting TODAY. It is painting stripped of its sceptre, of its compositional and technical canons. Painting shows itself rawly. The association with arte povera is inevitable and “its commitment to contingency, to the event, to the ahistorical, to the present and the possibility of getting rid of any visually univocal discourse”, in the words of Germano Celant. The show is a chromatic experience that clearly transmits, from my point of view, a theme that Marco has already developed in another exhibition and that is part of his concerns: El triunfo de la derrota.
And here another level of meaning. Rawness, poverty, the broken, the burnt, a real world that is lived as spoil, a physicality that is experienced as unreliable, slowness perceived as boredom in a world that privileges asepsis, speed and isolation. The room-installation in the side gallery, made with waste, papers and remnants of painted fabrics, reinforces this association with the poor, with the fragility and contingency of the painter. The exhibition maintains fidelity to the medium in order to express the contemporary world and the pictorial trope of vitalism: the painting contains a piece of the artist’s life and makes it present in its absence –the room would seem to be still inhabited by a painter.
Noris’s painting is a clear demonstration of all the concerns we live with today, of our doubts about the future, of our fragility, of our failure as a society, and of the strength and depth of the medium to express a historical conjuncture.