Nasci solo muori solo,
ed è già un eccesso di compagnia
Solo show
October/November 2023
Studio Ferrari, Bologna
Photo: Stefano Maniero
Text curated by olivia teglia
From the echo of Carmelo Bene's words takes shape in the spaces of Studio Ferrari Nasci solo muori solo - which is already an excess of company, solo show by Andrea Marco Corvino: an invitation to get lost among memories, evocations and dreams - individual and collective.
The artist accompanies the viewer through an essential, linear painting practice that gradually generates an archive of hybrid images, ancient iconographies and personal memories, happenings and fables that are grafted into a timeless and autobiographical narrative.
The visual references are multiple and accumulate on the canvas as lost and found objects, enhanced as symbols open and accessible to anyone who looks at them. The viewer is free to recompose the itinerary, in a continuous game of interpretation and reappropriation.
Cave canem reinvents the domestic iconography of "beware of the dog," placed metaphorically as an entry signal into the artist's intimate and personal world. Somewhere, under a sky studded with two eight-pointed stars, a dual and perfect figure uniting in itself the masculine and the feminine rises solemnly from the earth, rising to the sky in Salutation to Sun.
Painting becomes particularly sparse, dry and fast in Trattato male, as the title ironically suggests: the work here is a blank page on which to write, a cognitive map populated with anthropomorphic figures and key elements of Corvino's "SOLO" show, which are delineated through a concise sign between magic numbers and pop lettering.
Symbols that the artist juxtaposes and stitches together recur in the three textile and patch works on canvas - Primitive, Vision and Tempo Terreno - as well: floral elements meet eight-pointed stars, faces and epigraphic characters.
The journey continues through the parks of Marrakesh, in Man walking his dog during the earthquake in the Menara Gardens, where fragments of news stories mingle with symbols, colors and architecture, under a sky illuminated by a star bearing the letter "Z" of the Typhinagh alphabet, also the symbol of the Berber flag.
At the heart of the exhibition, Nasci solo muori solo is a protective and propitiatory statuette, with visual annotations and private symbolism, referring to the artist himself, as if to sublimate its essence into a fetish or divinatory figurine molded in clay and subsequently fired, glazed and finished.
Finally, the two Totems guard the artist's universe, supporting it as if to simulate an architecture. The heads depicted come from different worlds: a statue of a dog seen in front of a Kentucky Fried Chicken during a trip to Guatemala, an African mask, a sculpture from a museum in Mexico City, and that of a ram seen at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin join other faces into a single totemic figure.
A kind of sacred temple is thus delineated that is also a potential container of a collective unconscious: the mnemonic and private landscape of Andrea Marco Corvino aspires to open up to a broader dreamlike geography, while holding fast to a recognizable aesthetic that plays with the languages of graphics and graffiti.
