The exhibition aims to shed light on Mario Schifano’s extensive and varied production of works on paper throughout the 1960s. It features a selection of works on paper that retraces the best-known cycles that the artist was concurrently also creating on canvas, beginning with the Monocromi and ending with the Compagni compagni series.
Mario Schifano’s work and personal journey were intense and never separate. His works on paper represent an important and extensive production. The selection on display at the gallery demonstrates that throughout the decade of the 1960s, for Mario Schifano art was everything, TUTTO: art that evolves and revolves around the subject, reality, and a new mindful consciousness in relation to the city, human space, life and emotions. In the same manner as his paintings, Schifano’s works on paper provide vivid evidence of how everything influenced his way of seeing and thinking: films, signage, advertising, politics, his personal love stories and friendships. Schifano instinctively understood that art is life and vice versa. Right from the start he differentiated himself from the American phenomena of pop art and new dada, and from everyone else for the rest of his career. His artworks on paper are the geographical map of his way of thinking and his practice.
Works on paper occupy an important place in Schifano’s oeuvre and are essential to a comparative interpretation of his entire production, both in terms of their relationship with the paintings and their expressive language.
From the early years of the monochromes which contain and re-elaborate street art and the language of pop culture—pop, not in terms of pop art, but rather as the popular language of sign painters—up until the emulsion canvases, paper was always present as the constant for any idea that intersected the moment. In Schifano’s world, images can no longer be analyzed and interpreted in a familiar way. The traditional relationships of composition vanish, leaving room for myriad possibilities, which the artist selects and uses as an inevitable step in his process. Whatever is taken for granted in pictorial or photographic terms evaporates in Schifano’s work: he confronts us with a new way of looking at reality and invention, which in his work becomes manipulation through painting, regardless of the support.
Schifano’s work during the 1960s compels us to analyze the functions and use of social roles and cultural and political contexts. It also raises the question about the new fields of creation. His work is a philosophical exercise linked to the experience of life; a call for the analysis of real and widespread behavioral modes as an antithesis to elitist or specialistic ones.
In his work—which is ultimately biographical—Schifano seemingly plays with centralising, authoritarian connotations, only to suddenly reveal the contrary: an open, voluntary and participatory system of art. Ontology is opposed to use, authorship to accessibility and participation, appropriation to adoption, and creativity to the attribution of meaning. Everything is there to be selected and shared. From an archive in the making, composed of the bulk of painted and drawn papers and the claim of totality, one moves to the next phase of pictorial collation which is an exercise in distinguishing, rummaging, selecting and recycling. Schifano is empirical and experimental; he craves for the world that presents itself before him and transforms everything into pure painting. It does not have to be on canvas, it can also be on paper.
Curated by
Alberto Salvadori
at Gió Marconi, Milan
until November 4, 2023