Pablo Marchetti De la fuente

Lives and works in Milan, MI

Artist statement

My practice investigates perception and attention during the viewer’s encounter with the work: the way the gaze settles on a single material element in space and remains there. The resulting image is never identical, but shifts with one’s position, the light, and the viewer’s movement. The surface becomes an unstable field: not a fact to be observed, but something that happens as one looks at it. This prolon ged attention is close to a state of trance, to the non-duality in which the one who looks and the thing looked at cease to be distinct. The gesture remains inscribed in the material as a memory of the body. The work holds the act that produced it, while the viewer who contemplates it withdraws for a moment from their own doing and simply looks. This is the threshold of Scho penhauer’s sublime, where that which exceeds us and might overwhelm us ceases to threaten and becomes pure idea. I work along several lines; two ongoing series reveal the core of this research. In Solchi, glitter and glue are deposited and carved into the canvas, forming reliefs that catch and fragment the light. Glitter is the industrial heir of gold, which mo dernity demoted to mere ornament, and in doing so excluded surface from the domain of seriousness: to use glitter is to affirm that appearance is not the oppo site of depth. In Incisioni, anodized aluminum accumulates layers of marks and erasures until it becomes a mirror: the surface reflects the light and returns it according to the...

Artwork