MARCO BIZZARRI

Marco Bizzarri’s observations of rural landscapes is a continuing project, visiting the same locations in abandoned mining towns across the desert in Chile. First encountering the paintings is much like confronting a bright day after being inside, the image reveals itself slowly amongst flicked paint. Across the project Bizzarri revisits the same objects in varying states of decay, working from his own photographs, he uses layered splatters of paint that lends itself to the contrasting shadows and bright light of the desert. The splatters also seek to represent an invisible element that contaminates the air, by-products of mining waste that get kicked up by desert wind. There's an element of wonder here, a childlike attempt to play with the dust illuminated by a stream of light. To capture it. Hold it. Despite the absence of people, there's an unmistakable humanistic quality to the paintings. The positioning of a chair like someone was just sitting in it, the seat still warm despite decades of decay.

 Marco Bizzarri B. 1988 Santiago, Chile, lives and works in England. Bazzari’s practice deals with memory, commemoration and the archive-record through painting, installation and video. His paintings respond to the exercise of collecting and translating images by delving into the material possibilities of pictorial language. The result combines abstraction and figuration: the images reveal the multiple resources with which they have been constructed. The pictorial image, taken from personal photographs, is constructed from the dynamic between revealing and concealing. The action of covering the surface, through the gesture of flicking paint, is articulated as a way of silencing elements and at the same time charging the composition with a singular graphic and chromatic expression.