The exhibition Miramare, presenting works by italian artist Flavio de Marco, focuses on the fantasy – dimensions of landscapes in the time of the mass tourism and online travel booking.
Many years ago, the classical landscape image started to sneak into postcards, advertising bills and touristic brochures and since a couple of years, it has made its way onto the computer screen. It started to appear on the websits of travel agencies, airlines and large hotel companies – as a background image to their booking forms and as promising preview of desirable parks or beaches owned by hotel companies.
Today’s glossy views of traveling destinations on the internet nourish its viewers desire to take part in it. The contemplation upon these cleaned and manipulated images is nearly being perceived as a real experience and though, it changes the perception of the traveler.
Flavio de Marco is reading the computer screen as a window towards the modernistic world and made it a role model for his artistic work. In 1999, he started using screenshots of touristic websites as subjectss of his paintings, stripping off all the functions, texts and labels. In so doing, he changed a virtual space of practical use into a real object that cannot be changed and that is of no other use than perception. Like the classical landscape painting.
Since that time, Flavio de Marco is transforming the virtual content of computer screens via the medium of the classical oil painting. Images at the edge of disappearance, just one click away from a different destination and a different landscape, become a physical surface and remind us of the preciousness of a real world that is being reduced to a virtual existence. It is not the discovery of landscape, country or culture we are aiming for anymore, but the consumption of its bare, censored and manipulated copy.
The exhibition ›MIRAMARE‹ at Lachenmann Art Gallery in Konstanz / Germany is showing a series of large, medium and small works. The large works (200 x 300 cm) show the images of the websites of different airlines, representing the stripped images mentioned above. A selection of DIN-A3 drawings, all drawn at different places on the Mediterranean, form a counterpart to the large scale paintings that were created exclusively from digital images in the artist´s studio.
This spring and summer, Flavio de Marco’s works are being presented simultaneously in three major Italian Museums: the Galleria Sabauda in Torino, the Galleria Estense in Modena and the famous Palazzo Corsini in Rome. Flavio de Marco’s works act as a counterpoint to the historical Italian Landscape Paintings of past centuries, who try to catch the essence of nature through great detail and centred perspective.
Opening 1 July, 6 pm
1 July – 4 August, 2017
Lachenmann Art
Reichenaustraße 53
D—78467 Konstanz
+49 7531 3691371
office@lachenmann-art.com
lachenmann-art.com