Armando Marrocco: To Exist is to Exist

Painter, sculptor, performer and versatile artist Armando Marrocco (1939, Galatina) moved from southern Italian Apulia to Milan in 1962, where he remains to this day. He was initiated into art circles by the influential Italian painter and founder of Specialism Lucio Fontana. Marrocco collaborated with many prominent names from the 1960s to the 1980s, was a cofounder and member of Italian art groups and a performer who played with fire etc. He was influenced by the French critic and philosopher Pierre Restany and the artist Yves Klein, the founders of the New Realism. In his rich career, the vital Italian bard has realized many projects outdoors, in contemporary galleries, as well as in churches and monasteries throughout Italy. He has received numerous awards for his contribution to contemporary Italian art and participated at the Venice Biennale.

The exhibition in the Lapidarium, where displayed artworks range from the 1960s to his recent works, could be described as a mini retrospective. The artworks composed from a variety of natural and artificial materials, which the artist sensibly designs, combines and adapts to his vision, are characterized by a Mediterranean sense of beauty. They reflect the author’s dialogue with the sunny and sea areas, with quotations from archaic civilizations and humanistic, almost Platonic messages, which can be seen in the titles of some artworks. Despite its conceptualist and postmodernist elements, Marrocco presents himself to us as a classic and skilful craftsman, as a sentient individual and aesthete who listens to cosmic creation, marvels at it, and allows it to shine through colourful and optimistic expression. Taking into account the material, visual and substantive dimensions of an individual work of art, it provides us with stories that are interweaved also in a specific summer and place during this installation. We hear, see, and perceive them as exciting illusions, symbols, and archetypes that sail beyond our subjective experience of time and space.

Curator: dr. Robert Simonišek

Photo: Tomaž Grdin, GBJ archive