Biography
Survey on the sign
Paintings, digital works and engravings by Marco Del Vecchio
Painting is always a dialogue between two, an intimate dialogue, a private one happening in the mind of the artist who performs it within the four walls of a studio, of the place of creation. Painting is therefore a metaphor for reflection, a full contact between two entities, the artist’s mental body and the material body of the work in progress, by a knowledge process developing through various shapes. One of the noble fathers of the informal, Jackson Pollock, stated peremptorily that “painting is a self-discovering action. Any great artist paints what he/she is”. Indeed, he should be believed, since this is also an aptitude belonging to other genres and artists from several geographies of cultural thinking. The young Marco Del Vecchio, coming from Salento and displaying here a selection of recent works – paintings, digital projects and engravings – for some years has been approaching the primary roots of painting, a slow study of the sign and its functionalities that overlook aesthetics in order to become a metaphor for events, perceptions, dreams and visions broadening or narrowing on the basis of a private and sometimes inscrutable visual alphabet. Del Vecchio’s survey moves around two fundamental cardinal points: on the one side, there is a weakness – absolutely not concealed – for the informal painting, emerging above all in the works painted by mixed techniques on various supports; on the other side, particular attention is paid to the “natural universe”, obviously not intended in its traditional meaning as place of wonders, from which gleaning to give life to a wistful patrimony.
In this cycle nature is, in fact, a place of signs and tonality of colours, of inspirations translating into the chaotic rhythm of such an insatiable painting that swallows suggestions to return pictorial waves already simplified or under simplification, in the pursuit of a path still in progress, given their author’s young age.
Even some titles of the works presented on these pages reveal a strong bond with nature, as in Second Season and in Third Season, two paintings linked exactly to the Informal, but not to the Informal by Pollock or Tobey, just to mention two essential representatives of overseas informal tendencies, rather to the Informal by an authentic Italian as Ennio Morlotti.
As such a refined scholar as Maurizio Calvesi stated, Morlotti’s painting turns “towards a new naturalism of Lombard influence, with the landscape as its main theme. Morlotti’s new naturalism, in consideration of its search for matter and its highly anti-formalistic character, can be considered as one of the nearest expressions of Italian painting to the trend of the informal”.
As in the artist from Lecco’s painting, Marco Del Vecchio recovers the memory of some places, in his case out of any specific geography, of static, primordial vegetation, which he transfers in his works with an almost instinctual approach. Then, the fact that it is a debuting artist as Del Vecchio who revives these visionarities is peculiar, proving that historical courses and recourses concern certainly even art, the place of revival for excellence.
This is also what happens in Perfect Storm, in Del Mar, two mixed techniques, and in Drops, an evanescent and persuasive graphical re-elaborated version; on other occasions as well, the attention to nature and its declinations is confirmed just by the title, as in The Last Flowers, 2014. Anyway, in the selection of this publication there is the will for nomadism, as the title Survey on the Sign suggests. The same approach is also evident in his paintings, which lose totally touch with the “natural” reality to become a pure formal exercise.
This is what happens in a series of Untitled, where the continuous alternation of texture and tone interchange in the free space of canvas, a surface to compose and decompose according to personal attitudes also becoming intimate rhapsody. And to a certain temperament – remember the opening quotation by Pollock highlighting the introspective character of pictorial medium – probably belong even the strong contrasts we find in some paintings.
The inflamed red and the ultramarine blue colours fray in black abysses, in signs that break irremediably the illusory calmness of composition. A quite different planning is traceable in the engravings published here, where the spirit of painting becomes pure sign, and where the manual practice gets slower, in order to support times and methods dictated by acids and forms of plates. These are works characterised by Del Vecchio’s will to investigate art boundaries, in order to recover shreds of reality to be re-elaborated, re-invented.
Traduzione Jenny Manisco
