REMARKABLE AND CURIOUS CONVERSATIONS

MARCO CALI

Marco Cali, Shrooms (2009)
Acrylic, ink, wood, card, paper, cloth
40 x 40 x 5cm (approx)

Marco Cali, Her Copy (2009)
Oil on paper
550 x 340 cm

Marco Calí has wide-ranging art practice that is loosely concerned with the ideas of an underlying order that is then re-presented to reveal a specific aspect of that order. In this respect, he is much like a nerdy teenager who takes something apart ostensibly to find out how it works, only to re-assemble it into a new configuration that plays on its very form.

The re-assembly however, is never a dry affair and the finished artwork always alludes to an ascetic that has much in common with magic realism and surrealism in literature or the plays by writers from the Theatre of the Absurd tradition.

As a consequence, his practice is wide-ranging including books that are wholly constructed from hard-back covers to scenes of cartoon fornication in urban landscapes constructed from food packaging.

The Film Stills paintings is an ongoing series where each painting is a single scene-still from a film complete with the dialogue as sub-title. The film from which the still is taken is unspecified, although the actors and the scene itself could be recognisable. Individually the paintings can be considered as studies on how film borrows from painting and vice-versa, with the text being either incidental detail or, as intended, the actual title of each individual painting. Taken collectively however, they also form the storyboard of a new film, a new story line where the scenes between have yet to be filled in and where the original films, with their individual narratives and wider histories, have a part.