My friend Marco Cortese, architect,photographer, designer decided –from a while now-to leave an identification trace of his stylistic path.
I consider it a display of maturity and awarenessstill in progress. What is this about? It’sabouta chirographic writingof a text written with ink on a page of tissue paper, as precious as a host, folded on itself like a letter without address, wrapped at the top with a knotted ribbon.It’s not a missive and it doesn’t contains a letter for the message is on this outside. And that’s it.Acard that can be decipherable only partiallyof a...autobiography? A quote? A philosophic mixture? It’s impossible to tell from thebacklight, there is no need, its definition should be enough: «Transparency».
The operais enclosed in a glass case: it seems to turn into a poetical baroque fragment. It’s an icon, asoft idol that stays at the center of the world, fruit and witness of a human presence that looks in to the mirror and talks with the beyond which its part of,announcing a chance for conversion. In flesh or light? We will never know.
It stays there with simplicity.
In front of this space that radiates,conquests and conceptually corrupts the attention of the spectator/actor there is a huge digital print, 230 centimeters large and 155 centimeters tall: it’s the picture of the big and exotic ferns which from centuries sprout in chestnut that rules, from the top of the hillof Pera di basso, the coast of Casamicciola. The name of the image is Folium and its name gave title to the whole installation which ends with a loop of pictures of woods on a side wall.
This is –in part –the representation of the last personal opera of Marco Cortese, hosted until Easter at Piazza degli Eroi in the shop “Atelier delle Dolcezze” Of Giovannangelo De Angelis. It’s theneedle of a compass thatoutlines a habitat of supreme chocolates, cakes and visionary bio ice-creams, that loudlyshares a necessary impulse at the center of the painting <Let’s reclaim the beauty of our Nature, let’s declare our love for the island>. Categorically.
And exanimating with passion details of leaves, shrubs, tree trunks, branches, lichens, solar filtrations, shadowy sprites, musky scents, thermosensitivemists, in the playful and erotic variety of green which is the color-have you forgot? -of Ischia, the most beautiful. Come on, let’s go around, let’s move our pawns and we will easily understand.
It’s not a case that «Folium», in the day of its inauguration, tempted us with ethical and aesthetical gluttony: guestscould get a sample of “Navel of Venus” (Umbilicus Rupestris), a new taste of Ice-cream studied for the occasion by “Borsa Verde 3.0”. Of this tiny plant that is a natural edible ornament between stones and rocky paths, only the best leaveshave been picked, selected one by one.It has been a curious challenge, but not even that much.
A balanced challenge based on the choice of its artist, strongly against the trend-these-oily, vulgar and without any sweet potential, but with an infinitenumber of scraps of silliness blended and pretended for digital socialness.
<I portray people and architectures. This is a project born way before the lockdown and covid –explains Marco-and it’s a response to all the bad choices that you can see aroundthe world. Fights against arrogance and prevailing ignorance. I felt the urge to rest everything and start from the Nature. Which is most beautiful architecture of the world.>
