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Works /
sHOTLINES
sHotlies
(Diptych – mixed media on canvas, 203 × 70 cm)
Critical Essays (at the bottom of the page):
- by Ariberto Scolli (Alias m°…)
Critical Essays:
Gunshots
— by Ariberto Scolli (pseudonym of Maestro Roberto Prosseda)
“To cross the boundaries of matter, to probe unexplored pockets of space and time: for centuries, artists have responded to this natural (though potentially destructive) impulse. To break, to transcend, to sublimate.
What makes the difference is the result: a hole in a canvas is certainly not enough to create Art. And the days when such provocations had any purpose are long gone. Yet Lorenzo Marabini has now found a sincere approach, clearly the outcome of a long and painful emotional journey. One need only compare his gunshots on canvas with his earlier figurative works to realise this.
Marabini is therefore a self-aware artist who confronts reality and seeks to represent it subjectively, reflecting his own personal anxieties — at times even traumatic and violent — but only after an agonising process of choice. And this suffering, accepted with fatalism and a touch of cynical satisfaction, is fully apparent in his ‘gunshots on canvas’.
Indeed, because he himself was the ‘killer’: it was Marabini who fired the fateful shots that pierced the canvases. Desperate, definitive, yet liberating gestures.
We do not entirely agree with what the artist himself states in his explanatory notes. Certainly, violence is inescapable and palpable in these works. But we perceive an even stronger breath of life, a healthy and inexhaustible energy that inevitably finds expression in the carefully aimed yet explosive bursts underlying his gunshots on canvas.
And we like to imagine the bullet acting more as a paintbrush than as a firearm: instantaneous gunshot-brushstrokes, inexorable, definitive, irreversible and, for that very reason, all the more intense and deeply felt.
The ancient wisdom of Chinese engravers transposed into modern, globalised Western culture.
Thus, the tiny fractures in the weave of the canvas acquire an expressive significance. The depth and reverberations of the penetrations open up a third dimension, revealing unsuspected abysses of consciousness. Yet the gun-brush had already anticipated the slightest ripples, even before the shot was fired.
The gun's sight becomes the inner gaze. The work is conceived, projected and ‘brought into focus’ within the artist's innermost self, an instant before he pulls the trigger.
And a single millisecond is enough to fix it, inexorably, in eternity.”
"sHotlines" (gunshots on canvas)
— by Lorenzo Marabini
The sHotlines series (gunshots on canvas) begins by defacing the purity of the white canvas with real rifle shots. The canvas becomes the victim of an act of violence. It turns into a “sacrificial body,” like a wounded sacred symbol, a relic, a warning. What remains is a startling trace of what has happened — a scar, like the one on the arm of performance artist Chris Burden, who in the famous performance Shoot (1971) had an assistant shoot him.
The sHotlines canvas preserves a sense of immanent danger and offers the viewer something akin to rapture and bewilderment... something that might perhaps be described as the experience of the sublime in the contemporary world: the dangerous gesture becomes attractive; tragedy becomes spectacular, and it draws us in. Perhaps we need to feed this morbid fascination in order to achieve a cathartic effect, to counter our conscious fragility in the face of a ruthless world...
Shooting at canvases. Like William Burroughs. At the shooting range. A frontal hole, if it leaves a meaningful mark, becomes a small “work of art.” To be framed. But a shot fired lengthwise, grazing the surface, traces the path of the bullet, its real behaviour, which in a single instant is also capable of generating a mark, a “red-hot line,” a creative sign — as fascinating as it is tremendously destructive.