Spotlight: Revisit Italian Artist Armando Marrocco’s Earliest Works, Which Elevated Woven Cardboard to the Sublime, in Paris

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About the Artist: In 1959, Armando Marrocco (b. 1939) met the famous Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana, who was taken by the the young Southern Italian artist’s interest in Art Informel. By 1962, Fontana had encouraged Marrocco to move to Milan. There the artist developed a practice that bridged an abstraction of precision with a symbolic gesturality, informed as much by mathematicians Fibonacci and Luca Pacioli as by the beauty of Renaissance craftsmanship. Recently, Paris’s Robilant + Voena opened “Marrocco Twist,” an exhibition of the artist’s earliest works from his “Intrecci” series, consisting of vibrant monochromatic works made of enamel on cardboard. 

Why We Like It: Marrocco began his “Intrecci” in the early 1960s, and with them the methodology that would define his career for decades to come. “Intrecci” means intertwining; in these works, layered and woven cardboard sheets are transformed from humble substrate into intriguing, substantial objects through the artist’s application of enamel paint. The artist has said that he considers these works a metaphorical “interweaving of human situations, positive and negative.” The works, both in their ordinary and profound qualities, speak to the complex experiences of life. 

According to the Artist: “When I create a work, I always think of it in a complete way. I think of works in their totality of the past, present, and future. It is why my modus operandi is timeless. I do not believe that a work ends when it is hung on the wall, but I believe it continues to live in space indefinitely, without dying. Works of art continue to transmit a dialogue, an arcane relationship. Sources are infinite, as infinite is the universe. In my case, they are the many experiences I have gone through in life, the problems I have encountered and the problems I have solved along the way. When I was a young artist, I fearlessly faced any experience of making: sculpture, painting, fresco, performance, music, theater. So I suppose my sources are a renaissance of craft. Whenever I am confronted with material or immaterial, I seek to reveal the magic and the strength within it. My work is always on the move, it does not represent, it presents, it lives with space by modifying that very space…In fact, my works are not height and width, but a volume where the back is an integral part of the body it presents. My art is, therefore, neither sculpture nor painting, but something that gives emotions, moments of life, heartbeats, breath, action, and gesture.”

 

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(1968)
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(1965)
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