MARCO FONTANI
This Tuscan artist began his studies at the Porta Romana Art Institute in Florence and then continued at the Academy of Fine Arts in the same city. His works use wooden panels and rusty iron plates, the latter with a process that corrodes the material and continues forever until it is destroyed. Painting on an iron plate with oils interacts with that process, arresting it in the condition that meets his requirements. The challenge is to go beyond that representation and free the artistic gesture that can overpower the cold metal plate.
He has exhibited his works in various solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad.
One of the main merits of art informel (a French term describing a swathe of approaches to abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s) has been to reveal to the world the beauty of subject matters that exist above and beyond the will of the artist; subject matter that changes over time: an evolution of shape, colour and consistency, which like a work of art, is only ever an approximation of itself. Marco Fontani draws upon the artistic heritage of art informel and reinterprets it, choosing to "set" his figurative narratives in bizarre and atypical landscapes: on an old metal plate speckled with rust, cracks and other signs of wear, that acts not only as a back-drop to the artwork but a starting point for the idea itself. An idea that originates from the metal slab, from its living "wounds" and corrosion, which the artist then uses to weave together an image, one in which the metaphorical outline and the metal surface become one.
Time is the main protagonist of Fontani's works, in both a chronological and symbolic sense: time as an inexorable process that corrodes the plate just as it corrodes the living memory; the time alloted to the artist to examine the iron landscape and unite it with the paint; and that which the observer has to discover the hidden meaning behind the image, a metallic heart that beats together with the painted colour. It is above all the time it takes for the gaze to settle on this abstract reality and draw from it the poetry, fragments of everyday life - interior scenes, landscapes, still life – which have been impressed into the slab, and which blend together concepts of transience, endurance, life and memory. For this reason, each work by Marco Fontani is a witness and tangible proof of the "here and now", of matter, in its continual evolution, and of the commitment to the "forever" to which art aspires.
[Daniela Pronestì]