Lorenzo Marchi

works/years 2000-2007 - series

It Scene
Soul of Rocks
Overcities / Fotopitture
Wee Wee Nudes

It Scene / Play with the Artists

The investigation on artists of the past and the present becomes metabolic assimilation of drawings and photos, revealing latent or ironical aspects and drifting meanings. From Van Gogh to Raffaello and Matisse, from Cattelan to the illustrator Pinter to Roni Horn. A rule of celebrities with its exceptions.

News, 2007


The Ambulance Disaster, the 5 Deaths and theTunafish Disaster in 1963, the Race Riot and the Little Electric Chair of 1964 have for Warhol their iconical source in magazines. It’s the tragic face of the popular cul- ture, the same culture that in the States was pressed by images of blonde housewives and tomato’s cans, common subjects for the joyful and coloured pop art of those years.

The big tv networks fa- ces the XXI century with more strength than the daily papers and the magazines. I’m sure the local interest will survive and prosper in regional networks, with local lan- guages and expressions.

But for the direct line from the world only the giants can fight: CNN, CBS, SKYNEWS, FOX and th others, the same giants that make cultu- re and suggest customs with the Simpsons, O.C. and Doctor House.


The only way to shake and test the networks realities is to vivisect their images and extract from the top-hat the rabbit of mechanisms adopted by the media


The TV medium is for necessity popular, effective and figurative.The artist can operate on the visual, on the front face of the networks in different ways and levels. For example selecting and fixing an image, the film sequence is tempo- rarely broken, also the mechanism that takes to a kind of apathy.The spectator normally rises up a protective field against the hammering of solicitations, he’s not able to substain it emotionally with the necessary intensity. Or elaborating the ma- terials and proposing them in other context. Now it’s the subject of the medium object of manipulation, selection, investigation.

The choices of the networks are vivisected and envoys in light some operational and functional models, procedures and tic of the mediatic power. Otherways the television images are disarticulated or cleaned by details and explana- tions, leaving perplexed the user just for their absence. In other cases the graphic process brings in the foreground and as essential element just that detail neglected by the spectators. It’s the case of the network heading, particularly em- phatic in private net- works.What’s the lea- ding and background message, beyond the news? We are here, here

is the news, we are the news.A Fox producer is clear:“We are part of the landscape”.

If we consider Mc Luhan’ assumption according to which the medium is the message, it is not possible to directly intervene on strategies and rules of the nets, except from the outside, out of the medium. For example in artistic field, it is possible to disjoint the discourse. Disarticulating the rules of the medium, modifying times and places, the message is disarticu- lated.To this point the message need a sense and must be rebuilt by the visi- tor-spectator, forced to go out of the frame in which we have gotten, used to stand and be addicted.

The black edge of the image is naturally the window on the world. What reverts inside the window is news, and has the crisma of reality. What doesn't fall inside the television window is not news, it doesn't circulate and therefore doesn't exist as fact. A reality not communicated doesn't exist except for few witnesses. Of how many slaughters lately have we known after rea- ding a book or watching a film about them?

Another characteristic that gives inter- vention space is the low resolution of images and the scanning, that becomes graphic textile or field of full color with poster or prints results.Also the image or the isolated frame, with a low aesthetical content, once submitted to interven- tion, dislocate the visitor just because he recognizes the source from a tv context.

The infringiment of the image with the television has come less, and its recovery worries, because it is thought

as a medium infringi- ment that cannot regress to a previous state of fixed images. The spectator is forced to recover criti- cal faculties and emotionalism.The still-image fixing the face of the boy with the gun, carrier of a slaughter, if observed far from tv rhythms and languages, suggest us the doubt: is it the monster put onto frontpage or the boy of the next door?

Other subjects of the NEWS series are bound to the themes of war and terrorism, in these years a continuous and sometimes obsessive presence, grown since the 9/11. Specialistic studies confirm the common opinion that the war, diffusely represented by television programs, is not represen- table in terms of complex truth and is widely invisible to the eyes of cameras.The captured images are often eventful images or images al- lowed by the players interested in conflicts. It seems that art, on these topics, can put in evidence the contradictions, the details inviting us to reflect. In this sense stronger or more faithful and true images don’t serve to art. Sources are other: cultural and human resources, more the instinctive and primary ones than those educated by practices and mechanisms of media culture.

Which relationships can have the artist with the medium for excellence, the most influential of our epoch? Surely not acquiescent or folded up on the models of the same.The decontextualization of the images and their treatment with the traditional means of art (one of these can be the computer, it depends on it is used) it confirms the specificity of the art and its independence.What it is, or should be, independence of thought.

(LMReview No2, 2007)