Returning to Venice

Armando Marrocco’s solo exhibition at Luce gallery

20 works from the 1960s up to the present day are being showcased

By Silvano Costanzo. The photo is by the great Ugo Mulas and was taken at the 1972 Biennale. It depicts five young men on an old wooden boat moored in a Venetian canal. The young man in the foreground is Mario Merz. Next to him we can find Pietro Gallina, Luca Maria Patella, and Henry Martin. The last young man is Armando Marrocco. He is sitting while looking distracted. He is barefoot, has a large mass of hair and a black beard. Exactly fifty years later, that barefoot young man is back in Venice. He continues to have a beard and long hair but now the color is almost snow-white.

THE EXHIBITION RANGES FROM THE MONOCHROMES
OF INTRECCI TO THE LIGHT OF MEDITERRANEI TO THE SHAMANIC MAGIC OF DIMORE

What happened to the old boat in the canal, no one knows. Reasonably, it never left Venice. Armando Marrocco’s boat, on the other hand, has continued to travel uninterruptedly for half a century. It has sailed all the known and unknown seas of contemporary art always following intriguing and original routes of its own. Now, in Michela Luce’s Venetian gallery, Armando Marrocco has decided to bring some of the most precious gems found (discovered, invented and imagined) in the artistic ports where he landed during his long voyage. A journey that continues to this day, after the forced and very painful seclusion imposed by the pandemic. The exhibition consists of 20 works pertaining-from the 1960s to the present day-to three particularly significant periods of his flourishing creativity: Intrecci, Mediterranei and Dimore. These works are seemingly different from each other, in concept and structure, technique and materials, but they are united by the same threads that make up his entire artistic production: a poetic style and the search for beauty combined with rigor. The title of the exhibition is “Mnestica. Continuità nel tempo.” It will friend of Armando Marrocco. Their friendship has few equals in the art world. It has its roots in their common Salento origin and was forged in that cosmopolitan melting pot of creativity and experimentation that was Milan in the 1960s, the Milan of Lucio Fontana, Pierre Restany, and Guido Le Noci.

HE HAS SAILED ALL THE SEAS OF CONTEMPORARY ART,
ALWAYS FOLLOWING HIS OWN INTRIGUING AND ORIGINAL ROUTES

Armando Marrocco and Toti Carpentieri are a rare example of how an artist and a critic can consciously, significantly and continuously contribute to each other’s growth. The works now displayed in Venice - from the monochromes of Intrecci, to the light and warmth of Mediterranei, to the shamanic magics of Dimore - are, also, the fruit of that ong-standing encounter of theirs and of the experiences that, over the years and decades, Marrocco and Carpentieri have wanted to continue to share. They are the fruit of the spark of common artistic feelings that was ignited many years ago, which fortunately has never been extinguished.