Marco Cingolani

Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea, Milan
Through July 14th

It’s been ten years since Marco Cingolani had a solo exhibition in Milan. The title given to this show Ho un appuntamento (I have an appointment) underlines the importance – and the long wait – for the return of the Como artist to the main city in Lombardy. During these years though, the artist has been recognized and has had many prestigious showing opportunities on an international level.

Cingolani’s paintings reveal and document a remarkable change in technique as well as in the formal and the thematic. The reinterpretation of history, of Italian news and of media events are still present in his work, but the denouncing of the social and political life that existed in his famous Ritrovamento del corpo di Aldo Moro and the Attentato al Papa and in the series of "Interviews" with Van Gogh, Stalin, Walesa and Saddam Hussein, give way to a more literary and poetic climate. A climate which can be found, for example, in the paintings dedicated to Oscar Wilde’s stay in Palermo in 1900 or those with main characters such as the Venetian Casanova or Maria Callas who walks down Via della Spiga or even Glenn Gould and his music.

His drawing looses the precision and the clarity of a formal construction and the images are composed through the chromatic placement of reds, blues and blacks. The precise and simplified profiles of the figures are missing, and they are not gigantic and invasive anymore but small and subtle: Oscar Wilde sniffing a flower, Nietzsche in his boots, Glenn Gould sitting at a yellow piano. The forms are fluid and almost evanescent and in the painting called Si, si, si he creates a particularly hot monochrome.

The color red dominates and builds the background and environments of the paintings. It especially becomes architecture and space in La Dolce Vita which is a stage set for a couple who is in love – an elegant man and a pregnant woman – who, in profile, are caught off guard as they contemplate strange forms in the sky.

Cingolani’s paintings express through narration and a free choice of colors the mystery of creation. As the artist says himself, the mystery of creation is revealed with the strength of a punch and the delicate touch of a caress.




Paola Noé
Translation by Holly Miller