Italy

FLAVIO MARZADRO

Years ago, Marzadro chose material culture as the great theme of his artistic research. For the artist, floors, pavements, the ground and other surfaces are a great book in the open air filled with representations of the historic use of the territory and all the social aspects that give shape to everyday life. The aesthetic research that interests Marzadro is the one produced jointly by ordinary people, which reaches back into history, to every period when groups and societies used their own materials to create their own parameters of beauty and functionality of forms, and different situations that were often preserved and hidden in various artefacts. This is the case of the floors that the artist presents at OPEN 17, in an installation that bears the fascinating name Manuscripts. A work that consists of three cement monoliths, worked in low and high relief, finished in lime, gold and black, enabling us to see the floors of the nave of San Marco Basilica, in Venice, Italy, in another artistic perspective. Once more, with his art, Marzadro proposes a disrupting view of humanity starting from the material culture that we ourselves produce, from the never-ending flow of masses operating anonymously, but which when combined with certain events that stand out from history, constitute elements of micro-history that so often pass unnoticed, but which the artist sections and arranges vertically so that they can be experienced and interpreted by everyone according to one’s own sensitivity. A fine invitation to read these Manuscripts.

text by Rodrigo Cervantes