MARCO EMMANUELE

A young Sicilian artist, initially dedicated to music research and production, in 2010 he decided to pursue his architectural studies in Rome, where he is currently working at the Lanificio studio. An eclectic and original artist who uses the most disparate materials, from ceramics to iron and glass, materials that bear witness to the human attitude to colonising and altering the places he lives in.

Marco Emmanuele's training as an architect will be predominant in his artistic research, his university studies will always influence his artistic work, giving an architectural note to his art and technique. Interesting is his work on performance and the design of drawing machines, devices that make it possible to create works with four hands, manifesting the man-machine and man-man relationships, actions and gestures that the artist organises with the collaboration of colleagues, creating real performances that he often records.

The Catanese artist's most recent research revolves around painting using impasto vitreo, a technique Emmanuele takes from the great masters of the past such as Tintoretto, who mixed glass with oil. The sea and its sand with their movements leave debris composed of small coloured glass in which the artist searches for the residual light of civilisation, representing abstract and at the same time abyssal and dreamlike landscapes in green, pink, black and blue. Tiny stained glass stones that the artist crumbles and mixes with rabbit glue to create the most rigid and darkest colour gradations and thus give substance to his imagination. Abstract landscapes that reflect Marco Emmanuele's micro and macro visions, creating surreal and intimate atmospheres that cancel the distance between canvas and spectator. Fragments of glass in which the artist traces infinite artistic possibilities and which he observes in their silent but constant mutation due to the passage of time and erosion. Canvases of rough grain that take on a third dimension, and despite the limited colours of the beach glass, Emmanuele's themes and depictions are never repetitive and monotonous, but he manages to create dynamic and never static representations. The artist manages to retain the unrepresentable in his lens and attempts to trace its colours in a defined manner. The observer is asked to focus his gaze on what is altered by a background noise, an essential disturbance, which forces the eye to make a reorganising effort.

Marco Emmanuele's work is immediately striking for its originality, for its immediacy despite the surrealism concealed on the surface, and for its intimacy, its interiority. The varying dimensions of the canvases, initially very monumental then increasingly 'on a human scale', the play of colour, the dynamism of the light reflecting on the glass that the artist makes three-dimensional, the rough but at the same time welcoming surface, the landscapes and more rarely objects and human figures, rarefied and decomposed, give rise to a philosophical dimension of art.

Marco Emmanuele is the artist who has succeeded in representing the unrepresentable.