Morphogenesis /
Mantegna
engraving printed on plaster,
cm 35x50x4
cm 35x50x4
2016
Studying past centuries’ paintings, it is easy to see how according to the time, landscape depiction has take up very different forms, depending on the different conceptions of the world and of nature in the background.
Andrea Mantegna (and no other artist of his era) has never made landscape the specific object of his vision. My work starts from an extrapolation of traits and landscape segments present in Mantegna’s works, which I then fuse into a single representation. This 'landscape of Mantegna', thus created, was engraved on a zinc plate. What followed was a dialogue with chalk, which through a direct contact it corroded and erased some parts of the representation. An uncontrolled action, marking a departure from a double 'fake': the one made by the artist, and the much subtler one, made by our culture against the vision to wrap it up landscape.
Andrea Mantegna (and no other artist of his era) has never made landscape the specific object of his vision. My work starts from an extrapolation of traits and landscape segments present in Mantegna’s works, which I then fuse into a single representation. This 'landscape of Mantegna', thus created, was engraved on a zinc plate. What followed was a dialogue with chalk, which through a direct contact it corroded and erased some parts of the representation. An uncontrolled action, marking a departure from a double 'fake': the one made by the artist, and the much subtler one, made by our culture against the vision to wrap it up landscape.
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