Art & Adv – Marco Rea

Emanuela Pigliacelli — Wed, 15 May 2013 10:34:26 +0000

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/

Zoom – Anna di Prospero

Serena Silvestrini — Sun, 12 May 2013 09:21:19 +0000

Lapse into the unconscious and let it be the only guide: an operating method trough which the shots of Anna di Prospero are based on. Collected into the series “Instinct”, those images arise spontaneously, as the result of an inner strength, a primordial instinct that led the author to the realization of photographs seemingly disparate and free from any initial planning. An observation a posteriori let Di Prospero discovered the consistency and the meaning of this spontaneously born work: as she says, these shots are the visual transcription of intimate traces impressed in her memory. Produced between 2011 and 2012, the images differ between self-portraits, genre beloved by the author, and portraits of her boyfriend; fragments of faces (lowering eyes and smiling, talking or kissing mouth) and body (such as hands or the backstrips immortalized often during tender hugs) were associated to an architecture or landscape detail belonging to her mental archive, in which the author experience’s images are. As final choice, Anna Di Prospero composed in diptychs these shots with digital elaborations of photographs of water, clouds, flowers, grass, rocks, dirt and dust. Born in Rome in 1987, she studied photography at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome and at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2008 she has been selected for the International Festival of Photography “Foto Grafia-Roma “, with an exhibition at Gallerati Gallery. In 2011 she has been awarded as the winner of the People section of the “IPA” 2011, and in the same year, she obtained the title of “Discovery of the Year Award” of the prestigious “Lucie Awards”.

almost CURATORS » photo

Art & Adv – Marco Rea

Zoom – Anna di Prospero