PRESS RELEASE for Exhibition in Tarquinia July-September 2021
MARCELLO SILVESTRI
THE GIFT OF NATURE
An Anthological journey 1963 - 2021
Curated by Gianluca Marziani
The Municipality of Tarquinia, in collaboration with the National Etruscan Museum, pays homage to Marcello Silvestri with an anthological exhibition entitled The Gift of Nature, which traces the entire span of his long career. The project, curated by Gianluca Marziani, presents a selection of over 50 works ranging from the 1960s to 2021.
Silvestri’s paintings hold a dialogue with the collections of the Etruscan Museum and explore the metaphysical themes that the Italic people have always inhabited, through their geographical and anthropological DNA. When we talk of a dialogue, we mean a certain approach of the gaze; that special way of observing Nature; of capturing its cruel rules and an ability to integrate with the cyclical dimension of the seasons. We mean a bond that becomes poetic and metaphorical - never a copy, but born of pure inspiration, which feeds the memory with the traces of the gaze from past to present. In the end it is precisely this gaze, this observation of the landscape that unites the Italic people over the millennia, reminding us that Nature is a gift, as much today as it was two thousand years ago. A gaze which becomes embryonic; without worldly pollution; fueled by a dialogue with a world that assumes the burden of a primordial memory, and of the semantic rigor with which the work is born both "inside" and "through" Nature.
Marcello Silvestri is an artist who always worked in conscious solitude in the visceral heart of his Etruscan land, under the evocative light of his studio in the hills. He took inspiration from his favourite themes, which evolved inspired by and in harmony with the seasons and the solar cycle. An artist of primordial signs and alchemical strength, he is the author of works that filter and sublimate cosmic forms, ancestral symbols, pagan cultures, the harmony of chromatic signs and the emotional intensity of spontaneous geometry with his seeming abstractions.
Silvestri's works belong to the biological process of natural materials, remodeled in their fragmentary detachment from their places of origin, so as to belong to a pictorial process that follows the harmonious cycle of the seasons. Each element is taken by the artist in an incessant recovery of nature that changes skin, colour, size, shape… Silvestri listens to the silent sounds that the materials evoke, captures their cellular instinct and their pictorial destiny. He takes those fragments that contain the magical potential of (re)composition; of iconographic harmonies; of the balance between empty and full, light and dark, smooth and rough, compactness and fibrousness …
Nature is the metaphysical theme that unifies the entirety of the artist’s work. It is never a question of a didactic access to the landscape - on the contrary, everything passes through the grammar of seeming abstractions, within informal material that burns and dries, within a liberated geometry that reshapes the logic of the gaze. The references - never to be taken for granted - to Alberto Burri, Afro, Toti Scialoja and Osvaldo Licini, are inspiring traces left by this heritage, and implicit thrusts that one sees upon re-visiting the works now as part of the cycle of a long career. In Marcello Silvestri's anthological journey we find materials that have undergone the pressure of time and the consumption of space, becoming archeologies of the natural landscape; traces and footprints that metabolise similarities in a personal pictorial pentagram.
Alphabets… the hybrid sign embodies the private code of primitive alphabets - true semantic aggregates that speak a hidden and Neolithic language. Silvestri's alphabets are significant forms that compose and coalesce, resembling ideal landscapes as seen from the sky. The artist combines the signs as if they were intertwining phrases, evoking the linguistic babel of a Nature that includes Culture, its techne and the Etruscan foundation of the ideal city.
Auroras... geometries that resemble doors in the sky, windows shaped like golden lakes on the moon’s surface. These works by Silvestri resemble compact luminous apparitions, electrical geometries like the Aurora Borealis in the northern sky. Seen together, they become geological maps of an inner planet that the artist reconstructs in scattered fragments on the thread of his poetic inspirations, of his spaces, of his beloved Tarquinia.
Galaxies… abstract ancestry is transformed into a planetary dance that has metabolised the roots of Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. The colours of the galaxies push the artist on the chromatic scales of the solstice, inside a Mediterranean light that unites the sky and the sea, above the crusts of alien planets that float in the astronomical skies of spontaneous invention. Silvestri's galaxies seem to draw the perimeter of the infinite that surrounds the surfaces of our visionary gazes.
Organisms... these are seemingly the most figurative works, nodal points that open and close the artist's thematic paths. They have the value of the biological gaze that pursues life, whether the organism is marine or desert, astronomical or vegetable. The organisms are loving gazes on the primordial essence of our planet, on the world we have inherited and which we will have to love and care for, with an awareness of a precious fragility that is transformed into regeneration.
Fabrics… wood is the main epidermis in Silvestri's world. It appears with ever-changing shapes and is worked in heterogeneous ways, reinforcing the idea that it is a sedimented but adaptable skin, a metaphorical symbol of an open dialogue between multiple cultures and natures. Wood becomes the ideal geography on which the artist's entire journey is arranged, a surface that welcomes his visual writings, his material phrases, his grammar of life and resistance.