River Phoenix
The show is about works of art re-producing global river structures.
Subject
Marco Conoci is a painter living and working in Milan he is represented by Galleria Le Vite.
Irma Vep
I’m sat in a cafe, just discovered the Arnold Palmer, which is a squeezed lemon poured into iced tea. It’s hot and I’m showing Marco’s Work to a friend curator. He is not amazed, apparently referential standards obliges institution, prominent agents and people apt for systemic change to not care or find traction on something antagonistic. There seems to be a strain or some sort of embedded code that makes art click even when it’s bad and un-relevant. Art needs to be made for the widest public possible, hence no public.
Irma Vep is a movie that critically examines the immobility of French public supported auteur cinema, in the movie Jean-Claude Van Damme is held as a new standard against a fading system, Maggie Cheung wears an SM Latex inspired Costume that makes her subtly reflect all the crumbling system around.
Conoci’s work caught my attention after I’ve seen documentation materials of a show he made at the previous headquarters of Galleria Le Vite, a full “floor” of a building in halted completion status, a perfect gallery for perfect visibility. He exhibited PVC covered photo-sensitive prints, the full pieces where beautiful and reminded me of Seth Price, in later conversation he said he mostly was thinking at Francis Bacon. I did not see any need to uncover the “in-development” prints. Francis Bacon is to me the painter that better describes what love is, Conoci’s work is mostly about depersonalized Id and emotional deprivation.
Zeroing
I was anticipating Marco Conoci’s Nth personal show at Galleria le Vite with eagerness, we’ve been mutually in touch and sort of in conversation lately. Out of the blue I’ve decided to organize a solo presentation of the artist in a residence I’ve designed hoping to turn the flat into a decent showcase of art – and to see his work out of a gallery and hanged into somebody’s walls.
For his next exhibition I was hoping he would work more on a recent painting he showcased in a collective display titled “Woman” a portrait predating graphical gesture with strict sterility. Away from Milan I could not make it in time for the opening and I was left with some preview text written by Marco, a text I was not hoping to read – sometimes artist are better off with art than with the forceful explanatory cringeness of their texts. So my expectations were a bit cooled off. No scene.
The painting in display were themed around an unexpected fetish for maps, river beds and geographical representation. The text referenced with an involuntary messianic terminology a necessity of clarity, lines that hyperlinked me to “Analogia Morbi” a chapter in a conservative book by Hans Sedlmayr were he lashes onto his contemporaries for an extreme detachment from the solid earth and the use of new synthetic substances, replacing organic and inorganic materials, the book -originally published in 1957 by Hollis and Carter ltd – is a text that I wasn’t predicting to recall while reading the artist statement – it was the tone not the aim. Sedlmayr is trash, Conoci’s work is not. I was eager to see the show as in a not so hidden boyish spirit I wanted to see paintings that could be an easy commodity in near future thriller but overcharged by an unclear political patina typical of some secondary figures of Italian Art, uber-coolness.
Woman
The painting I was eager to see advancements of was titled Woman. It was on display at the previous collective show staged in the Gallery. The painting nor it’s most peculiar de-construction of current means of bodily re-presentation was not on display.
Body_Cam
I personally refuse any intimacy with beaux art, almost to the level of not being able to withstand social gathering and small talks involving to some levels the presence, the orbiting or economical intimacy with painting, a commodity that does not fully understand its darker accomplishment as an infrastructure of social violence and to the enslavement of creative subjects to an optimized format of lighter fascism, a gregarious vector uplifting self-realization towards upgraded slavery. Marco’s exhibition was for me truly interesting as I needed resonance with something that was far away from what I see everyday and to concerns orienting contemporary emergent Italian production to unchallenging behaviors. The art I’m subjected to lately makes me theoretically suicidal.
John McTiernan
I went to see Conoci at the gallery a couple of days after the opening, and I was met by what I was expecting, I bypassed my usual concern towards the common usage of large scale satellite images, Landsat and Idrological Surveys (something that I’m personally accustomed to), and looked at the work. Sometimes we need “pieces” to be something else other than a background commodity for dinner parties, the elegant use of drugs in living rooms and acquisition standards within a solid social structure relevant for localized art scenes. John McTiernan 80’s first studio movie Predator had a troubled making process, shot in the jungle it implemented innovative usage of split optical printers, slit-scan multipasses and thermal scanners – most of the trouble was in trying to achieve a realistic camouflage effect, the killer creature in the movie actually visually refracts the tropical jungle making situational awareness a dreamlike survival hope for unlucky special forces members. Effects were done optically and mechanically, and were visually developed by R\Greenberg Associates, Joel Hynek was the head VFX for the movie. Most of the inventions deployed were based on a technique previously developed for Robert Greenwald’s 1980 musical fantasy “Xanadu”. Hynek developed a method for creating outlines by offsetting the negative positive high-con matte achieved via black and clear core keying. Outlines were then implemented to substitute, erase and replace a mock-creature with the final camouflage effect. Conoci’s last production imply a a metric system, or a unit as he calls it, applied to reconstruct an image on the canvas, the subject of the painting is created by a negative rendering of wall paint leaving to raw framed fabric the notational features of a figure. The end result and the process of representation is quite compelling embedding an almost resolute divergent visible tracking, making the pictures perfects droning byproducts and something that could easily relate to en-vogue non-subjective “Synthetic vision”, and old word for image intensification and common tropes on augmented imaging technologies for non-figurative purposes such has science datas.
In other words the end figure is a negative achieved by applying plaster to region of the canvas.
Jean Claude Van Damme was called during the production of Predator to play the Creature, he left the set quite soon.
Unprepped
Territorial Pissing starts with this line:”When I was an Alien cultures weren’t opinion”, Marco Conoci rendition of river beds and natural ideological infrastructure is uncontested, most of paintings use as a subject middle-east Asia natural factors. It is easy to – for somebody easily filmic – to imagine scientific rovers hovering these natural ideological infrastructures donned with x-punk measuring lasers or loss compensating sensors – and the static near future of being towards technological apocalypse gives everything an innocence waver, esthetic aims compound any political intimacy with contested territories or the usage of neutral imagery as a basic comms infrastructure of death. That’s problematic but it is also the platform to properly discuss something at the core of Marco’s late work, realism. Extreme realism is suicidal, as the artist likes to quote Maurice Blanchot’s suicidal droning as a platform to excess the mythomania associated with the picturesque commodification of painting and a non-subjective process that would ideally avoid the contemporary necessity of strict-autorship.
The global project of art since modernism is the advancement of the discipline via individualistic behavior mis-communicated as a mass conduct, one always acts as an edge of the peculiar portion of art he is practicing.
Springs
Marco’s redeveloped his work on photosensitive prints in this show with black coated security aluminium boxes. I felt no need to open those nor to consider them part of show. I’m sure they will sold out.
Social Realism\Extreme-Realism\Spawn
Most of the paintings and works proliferating on medias in Italian art are sold at less than 5000 euros, keeping art-pieces an easy commodity, inflation of the overall scene by costume rather than consumer price index measurements. Emerging art in Italy is transformed by an enslavement to social rules and the thickening of a cultural bourgeoise that shall prefer to not be bothered. Social Realism gained traction at the end of the revolutionary process when progressive art was abandoned in favor of easily understandable clear representations of social comfort. Marco Conoci together with all the rooster of Galleria Le Vite seem interested in an honest challenge to consolidated buying patterns. Commercially love-bombing collectors with difficult and critical work. The self-imposed procedural dogmas at the core of Conoci’s new production is something akin to Scottish Scholastic Philosophy, which is outdated and unfashionable, yet provided ground for inter-relations of quasi- as a modifier of subject, property and attributes. Extreme realism is found only via matter and proxying it as a purvey of further significance. Marco’s first nu-realist work dealing with no-preparatory drawings and tracking units is woman, a romantic monstrous reconstruction on canvas of Debbie Harry, a free use of multiple metrics and a lucid collapse of contemporary ideas of figuration, shapeshifting mid-sized portrayal techniques in an hellspawn. It is so romantic, it’s painful.
