7 February 2024   –   Time of reading: 5 min

“An Echo of Flowers” opens in March at the Hilde Vandaele Gallery in Watou

Marcorossi artecontemporanea is delighted to announce Mirco Marchelli‘s first solo show in Belgium titled An Echo of Flowers at Hilde Vandaele Gallery in Watou.

The exhibition is named after one of the Italian artist’s imaginative syntagms: “An echo of flowers”. Where the echo represents the resonance produced by these modest little presences, almost like sudden epiphanies of the past, in the form of objects and fragments of objects, when they meet, when they are lovingly manipulated with a great variety of materials: fabric, wax, paper, chalk, mortar, wood, lots of old wood, ceramic and paint.

The Italian art critic Adriana Polveroni says about the artist

He goes about the flea markets and second-hand shops seeking out old items of furniture and utensils. He takes them and puts them away. «As the farmers say, that could come in handy one day,» he says. Or he handles with them right away, working with them and transforming them to create new objects and presences. Every one of them brings its past with it; every one of them has a story to tell. «Every work I produce has a story behind it. Everything must have a story behind it, and everything is made of stuff that I find and recreate.» To which he gives enchanted, fairy-tale-like names with meanings like “Many good things”, “Reasons for happiness”, “Playful artwork”, “A mute scene for low clouds”, “Toys”, “Playing statues”, or “Echo of flowers”. But Mirco Marchelli is not a romantic young man absent-mindedly playing around with these toys, nor is he a prop master: he’s a rigorous artist, who began his career in music but is capable of a poetic openness, of what I would call a respect for time – musical and historical – and of a sense of the past that fertilises the present and (we hope) the future, «a projection back in time in order to move forward», as he said on one occasion, describing his sense of time. Features and qualities that suggest the profile of an uncommon sort of artist.

Faithful, in a certain sense, to the teachings of twentieth-century art, but adopted with a suave lightness, Marchelli works with ready-mades, or objets trouvé. Not to declare them works of art tout court, with an authorial gesture, nor to give them new life on the basis of a logic we might describe as “circular art”, and not even because these objects offer the carefree freedom of having been left behind by chance, and by chance having attracted someone’s eye, the pietas of the act of the person who picked them up, but because these objects have a story of their own: they are something. Almost someone, if expressing it this way were not overdoing it. And it is here that bricolage, in the most resolved sense of the visionary experimentation characteristic of the twentieth century, finds its most complete expression, putting together different materials, ideas and images.

If we observe the practice and pay attention to Mirco Marchelli’s way of thinking, we might say we have before us an artist who is more than self-effacing, which he is, when you get to know him, indifferent to the sirens of the art world and the power structures of the art system. And perhaps he would really prefer not to be called an artist, because he’s too busy, too taken up with making and unmaking things, with tangling up the present and the past, with manipulating, getting things mixed up, playing, pretending, having fun, being joyful. Do you know how Marchelli starts his day? «The first thing in the morning is Scarlatti: discipline and joy, because Scarlatti is joy, too. He wrote 555 sonatas, each more beautiful than the other.» But behind all this there is a quest, which I would call poetic, because it has all the wonder of poetry, and the persistence of a quest. And from music, he takes his discipline.

fragment text by Adriana Polveroni

Mirco Marchelli – An Echo of Flowers
10 March – 7 April 2024
Hilde Vandaele Gallery
Kasteelstraat 1, Watou, Belgio

In collaboration with Marcorossi artecontemporanea, Milan
This exhibition ‘An echo of flowers’ will be part of ‘ICONOCLASH 03’ a project by Hilde Vandaele Gallery and Queeste Art.

Opening reception, Sunday 10 March 2024
from 2 pm until 6 pm
in the presence of the artist