Marco Piemonte

‘OILLAGES’ BY MARCO PIEMONTE

Oillages it’s a self-coined term to describe the juxtaposition of paper-cuts on a surface painted with oil colours.

In Marco Piemonte’s experiments with painting and photography he brings characteristics of the two processes into juxtaposition and thus into play.

He has produced the series ‘Circles’ in which tiny figures are displaced from their original context (usually a celebratory scene of 20th century leisure) and strategically re-positioned within a colourful vortex of dried and brushed paint.

This seems to create imaginary events and new adventures as the postures and gestures of the old figures are given new lives, synthesized within vivid, formless contexts by the eyes and minds of an audience ever eager to make sense of whatever they encounter.

E.g. a certain perceptual trait explored by a tradition of painting draws us to repeatedly strive to reconcile a figure with a ground. Meanwhile to feel that we are a figure with a ground is a reassuring human principle.

Madness and fear, nightmares and nausea may lie beyond such an assurance wherein we may become terri ed of becoming detached from our ‘ground’ and consequently disoriented in formless space deprived of coordinates. Such a ‘ground’ might be physical, geographical, mental or cultural, but our sane, everyday lives rely upon maintaining it as something stable, even though we may suspect it is a kind of construction, a mere theatre of reality by means of which we maintain our well-being.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in Rome, Italy on May 1976, Marco Piemonte worked and developed his first artistic style in New York when he was 23, assisting Ross Bleckner during the summer of 2000.

He moved back to Europe and graduated from Marangoni school Milan in 2004 with a BA in Visual Communication and he lives and works in London where he became a college teacher in Visual Communication and Fashion Illustration.