In order to be receptive, the artist needs to be able to love. In other words, he must live in harmony with the fundamental order where he belongs and upon which he is dependent, together with all other humans and things.
Instead of immersing himself in it, instead of surrendering himself and enabling nature to reveal its deepest secrets through him, today's artist is too often inclined to impose himself on nature; he would recreate it after his own image. And the image of the work of such artist is egocentric, accidental, not free. Bruno Marcelloni, in his early works, seems to get off to a good start: he is attentive and receptive, thus allowing the image to be the result of the mystery of creation, and not the result of his own ambitions. Love, then, is what informs him.

Art as a knowledge tool

A presentation by VITTORIO SGARBI

It is surprising how unusually diverse Bruno Marcelloni's artistic production is if you have been following its development over an arc of time spanning the last forty years. It is even more surprising if compared with the opportunist rigidity advocated by many of Marcelloni's colleagues - probably most of them, in fact - whose aim seems to be that of creating an artistic hallmark for the market to put on display, thus pawning a brand. We cannot say as much about Marcelloni: he sees art in many different ways and many are the ways to shape it. That could point to a notion of art mainly aimed at digging in the perennial myth of the avant-garde, which was repeatedly rejected even by its own historic exponents when they used to seek solace in their distinctive hallmark.
While I do not rule out that this might be the case, my impression is that Marcelloni's flexibility, as well as the willingness to accept change that he has demonstrated throughout his career, are the result of an open-mindedness that lies outside mere art. In other words, I believe that Marcelloni does not belong among those artists who nurture an elitist and somewhat paranoiac notion of art. As a man who devoted a significant part of his education to the study of psychological dynamics, Marcelloni is deeply aware that such line of thought has justified the artist's narcissism beyond ordinary feelings. Marcelloni's notion of art is quite different: it is more sincere, concrete and open to the world.
It entails mutability as the necessary condition to establish the closest-possible relationship between formal experience and the experience of life that enables us to assess the scope of our knowledge. Art is research per signum et imaginem. On the one hand, it helps us to understand what we are deep down; on the other hand, it urges us to face what is outside of ourselves, the world of things, other personalities like our own. If art is meant as the pursuit of knowledge, we understand that Marcelloni needs variation because what he sets out to learn is itself relentlessly changing and elusive: here lies, in the end, the total freedom the artist can enjoy. Such a belief underpins his work of the 1960s, which was initially inspired by William Congdon's example, even though Marcelloni is much more instinctive than the American artist as far as nature is concerned.
There is no trace of the spiritualistic tension overloading the sensory perception's virgin emotion with too much pathos. By the end of the 1960s, Marcelloni liberates himself from all constrictions of representing what he sees and sets about exploring the relation between the harmonic combination based on regularity (sequences, combination of geometric patterns, etc.) and unusual materials, with highly original accomplishments. Marcelloni seems to have come to a stage where he could just live off of his artistic work. Instead, he takes delight in continually changing, for example by going back to representation with oil on canvas, or by taking up writing in order to create associations between words and the interplay of colours.
He uses photography in a conceptual and anti-realistic way, only to go back to the pursuit of the regularity of form and the irregularity of matter, which is ever richer, ever more varied in its arrangement and its changing shades of colour, and ever more fraught with non-relative connotations. Not a single contradiction exists in Marcelloni's artistic universe: not a weakness, not a triviality. Instead, freedom abounds - both mental and spiritual, rather than merely artistic.