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Olho d’Água
Fernanda Pitta
Geraldo Marcolini is a Rio-born painter with a long history of reflections on image, on the intersection between painting and photography. His approach has long distanced from narratives and symbolism, focusing on the materiality of painting and the appearance of things in the world. Though he has usually dedicated himself to the genre called landscape, he is not concerned with exploring the history or visual ideology of the genre itself, taking it as a field that allows him freedom of experimentation beyond the discursive aspects of the representation.
Felipe Scovino has already observed how Marcolini challenges the idea that painting is dead or limited. The critic noted that the artist’s works arise from an investigation about the state of painting, where he uses random and anonymous images as starting point. These images often captured from the internet and other sources, without any intentionality or previous discourse, are transformed in paintings that explore light and texture as subjects. The apparent “poverty” or “banality” of the images is to him aesthetic potential to explore mistakes and imperfections, in a self-examination of the act of seeing and being in the world. His landscapes are, thus, always melancholic and silent, embracing randomness and impermanence. This emptiness and lack of action, that contradicts a good part of the history of western painting, allows Marcolini to focus on the physical phenomena that capture his attention.
However, the naturalist and faithful reproduction of these phenomena is not his painting’s goal. His creativity and technical experimentation are open to imprecision, subversion, revealing, as Marcelo Campos highlighted, “an aesthetic where the visible becomes an interrupted and ambiguous spectacle”. This visibility is observed in its transparency and malleability to the eye, but also in what it shows of opacity, in the refusal to be discursively defined.
Recently, Marcolini has turned to painting aquatic landscapes, generally unpeopled, keeping the focus on water as an element that blends and reflects, that creates ambiguity between the inside and the outside, mixing points of view – we often don’t know if we are facing an image of an aspect of a plant, a rock, a fallen leaf on the water, or his reflex. In the ones where the human figure appears, as bathers – another historical theme of painting – his attention to the phenomenology of the images, to the permeability of shapes and colors is capable of putting in doubt the conditioning that makes us separate human beings from other beings in the world. The appearance does not contradict reality, on the contrary. On the surface of these olhos d’água (water springs) emerges the depth of being in the world.