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Bruno Marrapodi | MA TU QUI CI ABITI??

From 09/06/2022 To 09/09/2022

Raw Earth
Marginal notes on Bruno Marrapodi's research
by Valentina Casacchia

“I belong to no one and I belong to everyone
you were there before entering,
You'll still be there when you get out."

“Jacques le fataliste et son maître” Denis Diderot.

Thus says Genesis: "Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being". From the Sumerians to the Egyptians, from the Greeks to the Jews with some legitimate variations, man is born from clay, collected, modeled and animated by the divinity. And man uses clay to build his environment, immediately insinuating the temptation to think that living has to do with the sacred. Raw earth, a mixture of earth and water, sand or straw, other times wood was the first building material. The Middle Ages are full of buildings in raw earth, and not only that, painters like Giotto fill the buildings with references in the background of their paintings. The pages of De re ædificatoria, the ten-book treatise on architecture written around 1450 by Leon Battista Alberti deal with raw earth and its use, underlining its technological importance and diffusion throughout the world. Centuries later, the Viennese Secession recovered the technique and used it for sculptures and the preparation of canvases, as in the case of Oskar Kokoschka, while the Bauhaus combined the mixture of earth and water with innovative materials. With the industrial revolution, not to mention technical reproducibility, a chasm opens up on the theme of building and even more of living, which has never closed again.
In the 1950s Bernd and Hilla Becher erected a parallel universe on the many and various forms of human constructions, explaining how to sequence man's artifacts, perhaps of the same type, makes information accessible that we would not see otherwise. In the 1970s Gordon Matta-Clark intervened on abandoned buildings by making cuts, making holes and eliminating walls or other architectural elements.
Building is an ancestral attitude, living too, and kneading the soil is the first form of knowledge of the world, the act to which both the divinity and modern man have submitted.

The work of Bruno Marrapodi (Milan, 1982) from its beginnings, and in the various meanings that it has taken over time, outlines a trajectory from the outside to the inside first, and from the inside to the outside then that on living as a system of thought has set up a fundamental relationship. If living also means "Having an intense fruition relationship with an environment", in this sense it has a lot to do with your work, which started from pictorial representations in which the interior and exterior interpenetrated almost indistinctly to reach to a progressive isolation of essential habitable elements: caves, mountains, buildings, fortresses and now castles.
Contrary to how they have often been perceived and presented, emphasizing the folkloristic and narrative aspects, his compositions reach the essence of human feelings, opening the pictorial space to the act and gesture of being in a place. Sacred and profane elements do not mix, but wisely discuss their priorities; the low and the high do not approach each other, but dispute with each other as to who should have the upper hand. Night and day are never a background even when they seem to be, but connote disturbances and restlessness.
Of the ancestral conflicts to which recent contemporary art has made us unaccustomed to, a perpetual wound remains in this unfashionable painting (here understood as a great value). The wound of man with the space he inhabits, and that of the artist with the space he wants to represent.
From training at the IED in Milan in the early 2000s, Marrapodi draws attention to drawing and the obsessive precision of the pattern grammar with which he fills figures and backgrounds. He also acquires a certain Northern artistic sensibility, I am thinking of Ettore Sottsass in Whose empty houses? and the sinuous curves of Carlo Mollino. His first solo exhibition was held in 2011 at the Maelstrom Art Gallery in Brera and presented paintings inspired by the neo-impressionism of Paul Signac and the lesser-known landscapes of Gustav Klimt, where the individual is immersed and absorbed in the context. The painting here is very busy on the surface, the colors are rich, the sign made of dots or small circles is very dense. As in Byzantine mosaics, the more realistic subjects live autobiographical stories (fig. 1-5).
Of his southern and Catholic origin, however, the vast family repertoire of mixed dialects, delicious dishes, sensual women perfumed in summer, summarized in subjects and titles, remains intimate. Of his great passion, cinema: from the American tradition, to French noir, or Italian b-movies, there are countless quotes and puns, his typical annotations, which enter as signatures at the bottom of the works. The horizon in which he moves in the first phase of his career until 2016 is that of a dense and very figurative painting. To understand its references, one must delve into the beloved, albeit occasionally lived, Rome of the late 1950s and 1960s. In this period, artists such as Renato Mambor or Domenico Gnoli detached themselves from the legacy of Alberto Burri and the informal, to undertake a zeroing of the expressive data first and then a recovery of the image, capturing its aspect as a popular and mass media icon, and reconnecting with gratitude from the public, to the social context of the time.
In the sinuous, vehement stretch, dotted with anachronisms, we see the unconscious lesson of the artists active in Rome, those presented at the "La Tartaruga" Gallery, of the "interiors" of doors, windows, bedside tables and unmade beds. Not only Mario Schifano then, but also Philip Guston and the Transavantgarde. Due to the abundance of details and the crowding of colors, there are frequent references to Edward Munch, Friedensreich Hundertwasser and even Peter Doig who, after much conception, had finally put the emotional atmosphere of the subject back at the center of the picture. For this reason the Cannaviello gallery intercepts him among the representatives of the New Italian Painting in 2014.
While conceptual art spreads and the dawn of social media crosses the art world, the internal, seductive and mixed universe of a certain humanity belongs to Bruno Marrapodi of these years, inspired by paintings and narrated in films, in which he reveals the caricature of the social being, under whose guise the animal lives, often ferocious, schizophrenic and alone. Alone in front of God whose mystery and defeat permeate the furnishings of relatives' rooms or slide in gold chains on hairy chests. In 2016 he perfectly mastered the language of the sinuous line, of lively subjects, of grotesque restlessness, among the most beautiful works of this period he composed, Topless beach and ll Pirata. (figs. 6, 7).
Continuing in this direction however, the composition finds itself at a certain point a victim of its own premises. As has frequently happened in the history of art, figuration, if faced with depth and perseverance, can become an enemy, and rebel against the tools of which it is a daughter.
From 2017 onwards, the colorful and very rich scenarios of the hundreds of paintings painted without hesitation undergo a conscious arrest, leaving room for the desire to take the sign of which the figure or the expanded landscape can no longer be witnesses to the extreme consequences. After all, 2017 is the year of the Biennial of Christine Macel Viva Arte Viva, that of art as a garden to be cultivated, as a place par excellence for reflection, individual expression and freedom, and of the enormous Damien Hirst exhibition in Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, which overbearingly rewrites the rules of art between praise and protests.
Here, of those sumptuous worlds populated by velvety halls, lounges, cigarette smoke and record players, some ruined ruins survive. In this phase, a progressive emptying of the surface begins and an invasion of the field by the background. The rigor of the narration and the accuracy of the technique are set aside in the name of a primordial gesture. References to the organic, to the flesh, to original sin resist, but they are decorative components, part of the perimeter. The sinuous line breaks into tiny fragments, like breathless characters of a sleepless tale. Every now and then, a piece of living land, an island, pink or green, appears among the billows of confused and seething waves. Perhaps the dream of peace on the horizon? Certainly a legacy that has resurfaced from the storm.
The figure has disappeared, the narration too, the impetuous movement remains.
The two-year period 2017-2019 sees him engaged in non-stop experimentation where he deals with different supports, materials and dimensions, almost all on paper. Pen and notebook, marker on prepared sheets, charcoal on sketch paper, books, notebooks, napkins and digital tablets. Everything enters this movement of unloading impulses in search of a formal solution that can rebuild the abandoned embankment to moor to. Cy Twombly and Matt Mullican come to mind, but also Sol Lewitt's Scribbles: the point is that without ruptures or crises one cannot proceed, in art as in life, and the elaboration of existence while it happens and flows is a luxury for the few.
Collected in a sort of open diary, the results of this moment were exhibited in the solo exhibition Survey Sea, in Barcelona (fig. 8-12) following a period of residency culminating in an international group show, where the artist presented a work almost cinematographic inspired by Georges Simenon's The snow was dirty.
Since 2019, in anticipation of the painful years of Covid-19, where the domestic environment has become at the same time the place of safety and defeat, through drawing Bruno Marrapodi has reformulated the basis of his own language, including the pictorial one abandoned by a bit'.
He did so by courageously dragging the sign that had fallen in the storm to the other side of the abyss, stimulating the paint to flow into the environment, coming out of the picture's grip and adhering to all the surfaces of his newborn constructions.
Forcibly locked up in his own space, here begins the series of fortresses Locked (fig. 13) which join the current exhibition dedicated to castles: Ma tu qui ci habitati? As in his childhood spent in war where the children, by way of retaliation, draw castles in place of the rubble, the artist, forced into forced peace, has built himself a convincing shelter, the symbol of the glorious conquest.
What surprises us in this series of works, more than the content, the castle, which in the history of symbols has respectively meant chastity, integrity, balance, strength, is rather the movement through which it multiplies. Movement of the stroke, which is even before the body and thought. By dissolving individuality in proliferation and depth in repetition, we arrive at the emptying of meaning but the permanence of the form under a reassuring control. So apparently clean, sometimes friendly, this infinite sequence of buildings, towers and loopholes forces us to ask ourselves whether we are free or prisoners, if we had once been free, would we be now, all finished prisoners?
Bruno Marrapodi's work has taken a new path, it brings with it the passages of a path that is never linear or easy, on the contrary restless and suffered. We are all happy that he returns to the public with many things to say. There are many eras within its history and various questions about representation and painting to which the last twenty years have not yet answered. Certainly many, more or less consciously, are indebted to him.

Bibliography

Leon Battista Alberti, The art of building, edited by V. Giontella, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2010
Bernd & Hilla Becher, Basic Form, Schirmer Mosel Verlag Gmbh, 2015
Ilaria Bernardi The Turtle. History of a gallery, Milan Postmedia 2018
Claudio Franconi and Pierluca Nardoni, What a wonderful world, Skira, 2019
Ettore Sottssass, Whose empty houses are they? 1978, Adelphi 2021

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