Since the late Nineteenth Century, the billboard, emblem of modernity, has invaded the walls of the great capitals. An urban language that has since become an integral part of the artistic language and it has inspired several authors. Today, even more, the all-present intrusiveness of advertising has made these images almost invisible to our eyes. Marco Rea, born in 1975, attempts to give new life to the figures that populate the world of contemporary marketing using the billboard as a support and appropriating a process he defines “inverse” to the street art: he doesn’t bring the art in the street, but the street in the art.
Of his beginning near to the practice of graffiti remains the technique of spray paint that uses expertly to intervene directly on the faces and the bodies of fashion models. Flipping through the glossy magazines he has realized that these figures, aseptic but alive, represent for him the model par excellence to start. In each work launches a challenge with the case: the subjects are the ones that someone else has chosen for him, the poses have been carefully studied by advertising photographers of fashion.
The artist’s work, therefore, aims to return the unicum‘s aura to an object that has been reproduced in thousands of copies. The models now appear as distant figures, surrounded by a dimension without space or time. However, through the veil of paint, Marco Rea instills personality and soul in those subjects otherwise so featureless: the eyes, dark and empty, without pupils, give to his women an unreadable and enigmatic expression that allows the viewer to look at himself in those eyes and take possession of that portrait.
http://marcorea.carbonmade.com/
