Italy
B.Zarro

Capitalism revisited
Tribute to Mario Schifano 

“Well, it's as if I worked on the finds. The past for me is just that, finds, but not to throw-away, so I work around them.” (Mario Schifano 1974)  In the mid-60s, in Italy, took origin an artistic current, direct expression of the development of American Pop Art. The fulcrum of that fringe of Pop Art became internationally known as School of Piazza del Popolo with Schifano, Festa, Angeli, Kounellis, Lo Savio and so on. Schifano became the diamond point, the point of international breakthrough, to use a football term. The Puma of Piazza del Popolo, to use a term with which he was identified among the artists participating in the group and that the evening were used to meet by Rosati in the baroque square in Rome. Alessandro Masi, in his Di tutto un Pop, wrote: "expressing an interest for iconographic themes proposed by a system of communication already suffocating at that time... and refusing to submit to an indiscriminate commercial exploitation, nor a mercantilist reason, artists give up conceiving the object as commodities trading and capitalist conceptualism, relegating it to a refined and aristocratic meaning".In a socio-economic survey compounded by an excess of consumerism, of which the artist first saw the invasion, and with a system of Art commercialized equal than any other segment, B.ZARRO pays tribute to his illustrious predecessor in 45 years since the first appearance of Mario Schifano at the Biennale of Venice.He does so with the white Jaguar that belonged to the artist, which accompanied him on many trips to Sabaudia and many other somewhere and that perhaps his passion towards the car earned him the nickname of Puma of Piazza del Popolo he will use like a white canvas waiting to receive its effective concept imprinting and transforming it, in a capitalist review capitalist for a message of salvation, a sort of metropolitan blog on which to write an appeal for a new model of society, avant-gardiste and supportive.Perhaps not by chance that Schifano choose white his Jaguar, imagining this as the future role, in one of his flashes of lucid madness.As someone wrote for mine. "The decadent international capitalism, yet individualistic, in whose hands we are finished, is not a success. It is not clever, not beautiful, it is not right, it is not virtuous and does not provide any good."
J.M. KEYNES (The New Statesman and The Nation. Luglio 1933)

Text by B.Zarro