Painting errors
Felipe Scovino
Facing Geraldo Marcolini’s works is realizing the nuances and detours through which paintings have always been presented. Always accused of being dead, paintings, for the naïve eyes, seem to be destined if not for an end (here mistaken for failure), at least for an operational or formal limit.
Marcolini’s paintings are part of an investigation about the own experimentation state of this “cadaver”. Its starting point, or the image with which his painting dialogues, is confounded between a file of random images (coming from the internet, photos donated by friends or captured by chance, among other different sources) and memories. It’s the shield of an iconography that overflies, almost completely, operations, sources and landscapes that are anonymous or without a special meaning for the artist or those before them. Anonymous and common, these images are situated in an ambiguous territory: they emerge as ideas representing a memory, but end up flirting with a kind of impermanence, that is, the referred iconographic memory is perceptible but at the same time annulled.
If on one hand, it’s possible to note an absence of human figures, on the other hand, in an artisanal exercise filled by invention, Marcolini adopts the light as a character of his works. It’s the light that fills and circulates through those absent spaces. It’s the presence of an immaterial data that composes the supposedly empty scenery of those paintings. Besides, they are constantly announcing a surprising speed; they are agile and dynamic, be it for adopting urban themes and scenes, or even for having the light as passer-by.
In his technique using bubble wrap as an additional paintbrush, there’s an appearance of the form without the adoption of a volume filled with matter. In this low-tech and “flat” operation, his paintings create a fruitful dialogue with engraving. Also, it’s not by chance that Marcolini adopts the title CMYK, the initials for a printing pattern that involves the colors cyan, magenta, yellow and black. If the beginning of this investigative method – the adoption of bubble wrap as vehicle for the formatting of painting – appears in Bubble Wrap (2005-), we have in CMYK the inclusion of a brushstroke that doesn’t stand as a stain or error, but a chromatic detour that doubts the condition and appearance of the image.
This adoption of a scale that is, in a way, grandiose isn’t pure chance. It’s in this image enlargement that the scenic and dramatic character of his paintings resizes the appearance of two qualities that operate in synchronicity: melancholy and silence. It’s curious that through a process that can last two weeks, Marcolini generates landscapes (and the fact that the artist also expands the concept of landscape painting can be dislocated), that provide distinct qualities and subjectivities, while operating in shape economy mode. Melancholy and silence aren’t announced only by the absence of human figures or for being anonymous and empty landscapes, any landscape, but for the potency of this compound and for a kind of vagueness that lingers in his canvases. They are images that acquire notoriety exactly for their lack of importance. They are paintings of errors: incorporate flaws since the moment they are randomly chosen. In its appearance method, the printing of bubble wrap on a canvas also reorders and “correct” a range of errors. In this shape overlapping improvisation, imagination and errors become accomplices.