Marco Catellani

Marco Catellani, was born in 1951 in Cavriago (RE). Graduated from the “G. Chierici ”of Reggio Emilia, since 2006 he has dedicated himself exclusively to artistic research and has become part of the new artistic movement“ PopUpRevolution ”.

In search of extreme synthesis, Catellani deploys in his paintings an ordered army of figures arranged in a rational way, complex compositions, halfway between abstraction and stylization that create alienating optical effects. The characters with a determined gaze, sometimes absent, appear fixed, hieratic, at the limit between the physical and the metaphysical.

The artist surprises us with his precise and rigorous, almost maniacal technique, transporting us to another dimension, to a parallel universe (futuristic or archaic?) Of great strength and visual power. The references and cultural references are clear and important: from African masks to Léger's mechanical decompositions, to Capogrossi's recurring graphic modules to Roy Lichtenstein's abstract “still lifes”.

In particular, however, the artist developed Keith Haring's urban sign in a personal way, transforming it into a double line, a “tube” crossed by small sticks that give shape to the depersonalized shapes. A strange suspension, an unreal stillness dominates the paintings: the disturbing protagonists seem to be waiting for something, perhaps for answers. (Camilla Mineo)

Catellani's painting does not want to do without tradition, that is, something that has to do with consolidated values; just as the repetitiveness of the figures is never a clue, but is a sign of a complex rationality that rearranges things, bodies and their features. It is not a question of a simple reorganization of an organic fabric, of a type of existence that lies between the human body and machines and which transforms the figures sometimes into signs, sometimes into wandering protoplasm, posing, sitting, in profile, of forehand and backhand.