Claudio Marini is the protagonist, from the 5th of February 2015, of a new project for the Roomberg Project Space entitled Marine Landscapes. Thirteen years after his personal ‘L’Ottava Notte’ (‘The eighth night’) in 2002, one of the most visionary artists in the Italian panorama returns to exhibit in Romberg.
Island letters, textile scraps with swirling and unpredictable patterns, fragments of ruffled residual draping, of mangled flags, of deteriorated curtains float in the sea of his work. In the suffering chaos of dispersed and fragmented existences, it is the toy letters which indicate a possible direction, a trajectory to try, a possible way out.
With a kind of synthetic sum of his previous research (from scraps to black flags) Claudio Marini finds new energy in games and irony, and he enjoys himself in an etymological sense, turning that sense of drama and impending tragedy which emanated from his black flags elsewhere. Those solitary and dispersed letters are the potential matrix for a new dialogue from which to begin in order to give sense to that which is senseless, meaning to that which is meaningless, a minimum of order to the infinite chaos.
“Marine Landscapes”, are Claudio Marini’s interior landscapes which also become marine spaces in which everything floats adrift, towards a hypothetical new place. Claudio Marini faces his work each time like a castaway searching for a new landing and maybe in the end, all those letters to hang onto would infinitely form one same sentence: Painting as freedom. -Gabriele Simongini