Resonance of the visible
About Marino Iotti’s pictorial journey
by Claudio Cerritelli
Scraps of memory in the form of a landscape, this is how we could call these multi-material joints by
Marino Iotti, obtained through the pictorial qualities of the materials of which they are made, splinters
of various origins compressed in a geometrical arrangement where shape and shapeless are in balance.
The image of the landscape is a tangible stratification of fragments organized along lines of delimitation
between sign and color, every rule of construction does not deny the emotion of painting but enhances
the balance between the structural intelligence of space and freedom of pictorial gesture.
As he joins the materials, the artist suggests sharp glimmers and breaths of emptiness, cracks and joints
between one piece and the next, with slightly oblique patterns that can be traced back to a basic
orthogonality.
The landscape is articulated between calibrated measures and divergent orientations, through imperceptible
deviations that range from the smallest detail to the maximum expansion of the composition. The insertion
of materials into the pictorial field causes minimal tensions that change the moods and rhythms of the
landscape, landscape painting - let’s be clear - which is a different concept from the conventional genre
of “landscape painting”. Iotti is well aware that it is not so much a matter of observing the landscape as
of living it as an active material in its internal mechanisms, not only a formal but an existential development,
without excluding the poetic dimension of meditation such as thought on the precariousness of time.
In the process of manipulating matter unforeseeable events arise, the layers join on the edge of instinct,
unstable horizons are suspended between the orthogonal and the oblique, like large maps where the eye
moves towards thresholds of disconnection.
In order to comprehend the landscapes in their complex articulation, it is necessary to verify every
minimum variation, as each work seems to be part of a sequence that - especially in this last creative
season - takes on the character of a real work programme.
Alongside the wisdom of the pictorial instinct, the ability to treat the pieces, to choose them for their
chromatic quality, transforming a banal material into a different identity, into something attractive and
necessary for the stratified horizon of the landscape, should not be underestimated. Old salvaged woods,
fragments of hemp and raw canvas, damask fabrics for upholsterers, handmade papers, old posters,
empty, cut and open tubes of colour, pigments and graphs, pieces of leather: these are the materials that
attract the artist’s imagination according to the pictorial yield, quantity and quality intimately connected
in a single process.
The overlapping of materials and their contamination is never harsh, the material pieces are brought
together through subtle chords, the tactile inserts are used only when they are truly assimilable in the
body of the scenery In addition, there is a sensitive way of using the scratchy signs as further connections
between the objects and the pigments, as in the case of scalings and abrasions that reveal the desire for
the primordial, the search for the primary values that painting needs during the final assembly of the
landscape. The expertise of the pictorial operation produces a vision interwoven with shapes that reflects
each other, different substances that express their cohesion, combinations that have the gift of lightening
the weight of materials by communicating a mental reality through the sources of physicality.
This patient work involves an accumulation of energy that the project of each work holds within its particular
spatial organism, synthesis of a language that lives on autonomous and rigorous two-dimensionality,
emblematic surface where the painting is alone in front of itself, focused on the mental and lyrical reality
of its appearances. In fact, the surface is for Iotti the supreme place to measure the breath of thought, to
test the gesture that breaks and recomposes signs and colors as notes of an existential journey, a journey
in the journey that contains promises of future changes, other textures of the landscape, concrete places
of fantasy, new resonances of the visible.
About Marino Iotti’s pictorial journey
by Claudio Cerritelli
Scraps of memory in the form of a landscape, this is how we could call these multi-material joints by
Marino Iotti, obtained through the pictorial qualities of the materials of which they are made, splinters
of various origins compressed in a geometrical arrangement where shape and shapeless are in balance.
The image of the landscape is a tangible stratification of fragments organized along lines of delimitation
between sign and color, every rule of construction does not deny the emotion of painting but enhances
the balance between the structural intelligence of space and freedom of pictorial gesture.
As he joins the materials, the artist suggests sharp glimmers and breaths of emptiness, cracks and joints
between one piece and the next, with slightly oblique patterns that can be traced back to a basic
orthogonality.
The landscape is articulated between calibrated measures and divergent orientations, through imperceptible
deviations that range from the smallest detail to the maximum expansion of the composition. The insertion
of materials into the pictorial field causes minimal tensions that change the moods and rhythms of the
landscape, landscape painting - let’s be clear - which is a different concept from the conventional genre
of “landscape painting”. Iotti is well aware that it is not so much a matter of observing the landscape as
of living it as an active material in its internal mechanisms, not only a formal but an existential development,
without excluding the poetic dimension of meditation such as thought on the precariousness of time.
In the process of manipulating matter unforeseeable events arise, the layers join on the edge of instinct,
unstable horizons are suspended between the orthogonal and the oblique, like large maps where the eye
moves towards thresholds of disconnection.
In order to comprehend the landscapes in their complex articulation, it is necessary to verify every
minimum variation, as each work seems to be part of a sequence that - especially in this last creative
season - takes on the character of a real work programme.
Alongside the wisdom of the pictorial instinct, the ability to treat the pieces, to choose them for their
chromatic quality, transforming a banal material into a different identity, into something attractive and
necessary for the stratified horizon of the landscape, should not be underestimated. Old salvaged woods,
fragments of hemp and raw canvas, damask fabrics for upholsterers, handmade papers, old posters,
empty, cut and open tubes of colour, pigments and graphs, pieces of leather: these are the materials that
attract the artist’s imagination according to the pictorial yield, quantity and quality intimately connected
in a single process.
The overlapping of materials and their contamination is never harsh, the material pieces are brought
together through subtle chords, the tactile inserts are used only when they are truly assimilable in the
body of the scenery In addition, there is a sensitive way of using the scratchy signs as further connections
between the objects and the pigments, as in the case of scalings and abrasions that reveal the desire for
the primordial, the search for the primary values that painting needs during the final assembly of the
landscape. The expertise of the pictorial operation produces a vision interwoven with shapes that reflects
each other, different substances that express their cohesion, combinations that have the gift of lightening
the weight of materials by communicating a mental reality through the sources of physicality.
This patient work involves an accumulation of energy that the project of each work holds within its particular
spatial organism, synthesis of a language that lives on autonomous and rigorous two-dimensionality,
emblematic surface where the painting is alone in front of itself, focused on the mental and lyrical reality
of its appearances. In fact, the surface is for Iotti the supreme place to measure the breath of thought, to
test the gesture that breaks and recomposes signs and colors as notes of an existential journey, a journey
in the journey that contains promises of future changes, other textures of the landscape, concrete places
of fantasy, new resonances of the visible.