OSVALDO MARISCOTTI
I nuclei prospettici visivi di matrice astratto-geometrica elaborati da Osvaldo Mariscotti esplorano percezioni spazio-fenomeniche, che si dilatano oltre lo spazio e la superficie pittorica, con un'elaborazione strutturale in progressivo e graduale divenire. Mariscotti accoglie nella sua arte le componenti scientifiche connesse alla geometria, come originale accorgimento ed espediente tecnico di peculiare connotazione distintiva e inserisce una sorta di "filtro" virtuale tra l'immagine geometrica raffigurata e l'occhio dell'osservatore ... Read more
Elena Gollini
Critic and Journalist
April 2015
OSVALDO MARISCOTTI: THE NEW VISUAL SUPREMATISM
Many artists choose to paint the beautiful; others instead, decide to break down the sign, thus entering in the new universe of non-representation. I would like to introduce, therefore, the visual analysis of Osvaldo Mariscotti, to that school of thought, born exactly one hundred years ago, based on the instinct of Kazimir Malevich, in collaboration with the poet Mayakovsky, which took the name of Suprematism. Malevich argued that the modern artist had to look up to an art finally freed from practical and aesthetic purposes, and thus work only favoring a pure plastic sensitivity. He also argued, that painting until then, had not been more than the aesthetic representation of reality and that instead the end of the artist should be to seek a path that would lead to the essence of art: art for art's sake ... Read more: English / Italiano
Salvatore Russo
Critic and Art Historian
March 2015
TILTESTETICA: NEOTRANSAVANTGARDE
Osvaldo Mariscotti invece offre una soluzione scultorea alla scomposizione cromatica, elevando i quattro colori rosso, verde, arancio e giallo come strutture tridimensionali, poggianti su di un principio basico nero che ha la funzione di rendere più assoluti i colori. È come se i quadri di Mondrian prendessero vita e si muovessero cibernetici sui piani, elevandosi a fasce solide, a bandiere incontaminate, a stendardi si purezza.
Osvaldo Mariscotti offers a sculptural solution to chromatic decomposition, elevating the four colors red, green, orange and yellow as three-dimensional structures, resting on a black basic principle that has the function of making the colors more absolute. And as if Mondrian's paintings were to come to life and moved cybernetically on different planes, rising as solid strips, as pristine flags, as banners of purity.
Daniele Radini Tedeschi
Critic, Curator and Art Historian
June 2014
THE BEST MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS 2014: OSVALDO MARISCOTTI
Sintesi segnica e rielaborazione mentale, sono le caratteristiche più importanti di un'Arte che ha in Osvaldo Mariscotti il suo nuovo profeta. Il Maestro crea un propio alfabeto della mente, con il quale testimonia le sue idee. Idee che vanno oltre la comune razionalità del segno, e arrivano ad esplorare quei nuovi universi di pensiero.
Symbolic summary and mental re-working are the main characteristics of an art that sees in Osvaldo Mariscotti its new prophet. The artist elaborates an own mind's alphabet through which he spreads his ideas. Ideas that go beyond the common rationality of sign and arrives to explore those new universes of thoughts.
Salvatore Russo
Critic and Art Historian
April 2014
OSVALDO MARISCOTTI: NEW MEANING
"Hmm .... What is it? What's it of? Is it part of a computer? A piece of a motherboard? The insides of an electronical hardware circuit component? A CPU? A modem?" I ask because as soon as I saw Osvaldo Mariscotti's latest artwork I knew what it was a painting of, what Mariscotti was trying to represent. Then again, I might be wrong but, like you, I bring my own baggage ....
Like most people I've never seen the insides of a computer. However, I have seen all sorts of electronic parts through the eyes of an inquisitive 7-year-old child who dismantles everything electrical to explore its mechanics, what's inside them and how they might work. Today, this is how I see Mariscotti's art however subconsciously.
Much in the same way that if Manet were alive today, I do believe that as he was so into Social Networking, he'd also be encouraged by our technological age, and would himself be Tweeting and Facebooking whilst painting 'Music in the Tuileries Gardens'. And Da Vinci would be fascinated by the Internet, arranging its rogue elements into 'Vitruvian Man' compositions, structuring today's world within the artist's world. And so, intuitively, Mariscotti got bitten by the byte; the characters in Mariscotti's canvas balance the pictorial surface through an energetic revolution born out of a painterly rebellion, from Genesis to Generation X, because this is what a good artist does; he embraces the contemporary world whilst following in the footsteps of art history. Whilst, as Mariscotti says, making "a concerted effort to remain independent of other artists' views and forms of expression, in order to remain original ... Read more
Estelle Lovatt
Art Critic, Lecturer and former Curator at Tate Modern
July 2013
OSVALDO MARISCOTTI
Osvaldo Mariscotti has had a lengthy career as an artist. Starting several decades ago - as a teenager - he isn't new to art. But his art is 'new'. It is an up-to-the-minute type of abstract art. Yes, we know that abstract art calls for the obliteration of recognizable forms in place of rhythmic relationships mutual in form, line, and color, but still, an Osvaldo Mariscotti canvas is very different.
Informed and inspired by the exploration of principles between relationships connecting the idealistic analogies of Mondrian, Kandinsky, Duchamp and Cubo-Futurism, Osvaldo states, "I like the work of Klee and Xul Solar too. But I always make a concerted effort always to try to remain independent of other artists' views and forms of expression, in order to remain original in my work."
The central character in his canvas - an oddly shaped, black, entity - turns, floats and cartwheels across Mariscotti's painted micro-orb world, where - like a situation in which a new born child is moulded by its environment - a seemingly distant force helps bring together a certain order out of painterly anarchy. Under structures of beautiful, candy-floss hues, this is a world within a world that follows the second Commandment (You shall not make a graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, in the earth beneath or in the water under the earth), in witnessing a physical explosion of existence, mindful of its inner core spirit. Pious in nature, it is bound with a living spirit, a faith filtering through the flow of the pigment, automatically and organically ... Read more
Estelle Lovatt
Art Critic, Lecturer and former Curator at Tate Modern
Art of England vol 76, 2010
DYNAMIC ABSTRACTION
Ever since the advent of abstract art, there has always been a recurring desire in the minds of many artists, the recreation of dynamism on the static canvas. This desire has proven to be nothing but an insurmountable obstacle for many. However, history shows us cases of artists that successfully accomplished this feat.
Firstly, we can make reference to Wassily Kandinsky. His paintings were inarguably some of the first to explore the connection and relationship between form, sound, and color in an attempt to recreate dynamism. For example, the painting Three Sounds clearly emphasizes the use of musical analogy. Now, given that music can only exist within a time frame, we can argue that no musical representation would be possible without time. In this case, the artist generates a sense of dynamism, which assumes the passage of time, by means of his use of form and color.
Secondly, we can explore other examples of dynamism in the works of Piet Mondrian. It is important to note that contrary to Kandinsky's analogies of music, Mondrian's desire concern the emulation of his ideal of architecture. He achieves this deed "solely through form and color, in mutually balanced relations." However, when making use of these elements it is of the utmost importance to comply with the fundamental laws that shape the art. He makes reference to a dynamic equilibrium "which is opposed to the static equilibrium necessitated by the particular form. The important task then of all art is to destroy the static equilibrium by establishing a dynamic one. Non-figurative art demands an attempt of what is a consequence of this task, the destruction of particular form and the construction of a rhythm of mutual relations, of mutual forms or free lines. We must bear in mind, however, a distinction between these two forms of equilibrium in order to avoid confusion; for when we speak of equilibrium pure and simple we may be for, and at the same time against, a balance in the work of art." (Piet Mondrian, "Plastic Art & Pure Plastic Art", British Journal Circle 1937) ... Read more
Gustav Wagner
Art Historian
May 2009
INGENIOUS INTERLUDES IN THE NEW WORK OF OSVALDO MARISCOTTI
No one creates as gorgeous a surface as Osvaldo Mariscotti whose newest paintings are abstract in the old sense of the word. The artist's works consist of quickly applied thin rivulets, ingenious interludes of thin painterly strokes using effervescent colors - particularly pink and red, and blue striations - that are immediately seductive. With prolonged viewing you begin to see that these taffy colors are saturated with light. The most striking aspect of this new work is how the seductive colors act as a foil for Mariscotti's main concern: how to make paintings that seem purposely "undone" through the visually connecting of what appear to be interstitial spaces within the open whole of each work (which usually colonizes the central blank area of the artist's paintings).
Mariscotti's new paintings have colors-beautiful, off key, hothouse colors that fail somewhere between the palettes of de Kooning and the designer Romeo Gigli. The artist is an intense surface-worrier and segmenter of planes and no wonder: his new paintings are bold experiments in the structuring of space without using the normal emphasizing the traditional methodologies applied to the surface. Using very little paint applied so as to signal the greatest amount of surface tension spread out against the pictorial planes, the artist's paintings are ethereally transparent. The work, liquid to the point of formlessness, seems to be on the verge of purposeful disintegration.
Mariscotti's new work, for the first time, has eliminated from any literal references to representational reality from his work. In its place he has made as the theme of his work an investigation of the underpinnings, the structural support surfaces of his pictorial spaces; at the same time as he seems to be on the verge of dismantling them ... Read more
Dominique Nahas
Critic and Art Historian
January 1999
OSVALDO MARISCOTTI: INTERIOR LANDSCAPES AND THE AMBITIOUS EYE
There is enormous ambition in Osvaldo Mariscotti's paintings and this ambition immediately challenges the mind and eye. In these exuberantly colorful and densely textured paintings Mariscotti's great gift is his ability to create panoramic pictorial fields that teem with paradoxical elements of intimate subjectivity. These works, though, while heavily expressionistic are redolent with intentions of expressing aspects of the sublime. Also, a constant sense of flux and reflux is sensed in these deeply-felt works and I would attest that their persuasive powers are sensed primarily through their atavistic and vitalistic energies.
The vibrancy that results in Mariscotti's work is a residual effect of a combination of factors. The most considered is the artist's seeming passion to depict an interplay between two and three dimensionalized realities whose charged pictorial fields contains both the seeds of nascent world or exploding worlds. Additionally, a sense of palpable mystery abides where the profoundest knowledge of the unimaginable - through imaginary gaps - seems to be laid bare. It is through these gaps, these near-mystical voids, that the central intentionality of Mariscotti's works - to unveil an aspect of sublimity - is carried forth. He attempts to depict a sublime sense of magnitude in which the viewer's mind substitutes his own infinity for the apparent phenomenon of infinity before him ... Read more
Dominique Nahas
Critic and Art Historian
May 1997
