GINO MAROTTA Campobasso, 1935 – Roma, 2012
Gino Marotta was born in Campobasso in 1935. At the age of fifteen, he moved to Rome, where he came into contact with the artists who animated the Roman art scene, from De Chirico to Capogrossi to Turcato. He based his long artistic career on the exploration of new languages and constant experimentation with new techniques and innovative materials, sharing his research with the many avant-garde movements that emerged over the years.
GINO MAROTTA Campobasso, 1935 - Roma, 2012
Gino Marotta was born in Campobasso in 1935. At the age of fifteen, he moved to Rome, where he came into contact with the artists who animated the Roman art scene, from De Chirico to Capogrossi to Turcato. He based his long artistic career on the exploration of new languages and constant experimentation with new techniques and innovative materials, sharing his research with the many avant-garde movements that emerged over the years. In the 1950s, he developed a series of highly diversified subjects, styles, and techniques, including encaustics, polymaterial collages, and sand amalgamations. His solo exhibition at the Montenapoleone Gallery in Milan marked his debut in June 1957. At the end of the decade, he embarked on a new exploration. In 1959, he presented "Piombi, Allumini e Bandoni" at the Appunto Gallery in Rome and at the Galleria dell'Ariete in Milan. The works consisted of iron sheets taken from Roman shantytowns that Marotta assembled, often leaving visible the stratifications of images glued over the years. In the early 1960s, in chemical laboratories, factories, and foundries, he experimented with new materials and created sculptures using industrial mass-production processes. In 1960, together with Pietro Cascella, Piero Dorazio, Fabio Mauri, Gastone Novelli, Achille Perilli, Mimmo Rotella, and Giulio Turcato, he founded the "CRACK" Group, a cross-disciplinary movement that aimed to promote a new conception of freedom of expression outside of established conventions. As a friend of poets such as Ungaretti and Cardarelli, he also created artist books with Antonio Delfini, Giorgio Soavi, and Emilio Villa. Marotta's inclination for using unconventional materials continued with sculptures in acrylic, an artificial and highly technological material in stark contrast with subjects derived from the natural world. With this series of works, he conducted research to capture the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial. The transparent, two-dimensional acrylic sheets were arranged in orthogonal sections, giving the sculptures a three-dimensional quality and allowing light to pass through rapidly. For Marotta, acrylic became a favored medium, describing it as "the only material that does not degenerate because it is highly technological." Transparency, previously associated with noble materials such as glass, was transferred to this new artificial material. Acrylic itself almost necessitated the introduction of light: "I used light as color instead of material color," said Gino Marotta. During those years, he incorporated neon light into the works exhibited at the "Naturale-Artificiale" exhibition at the Galleria dell'Ariete, curated by Beatrice Monti in Milan. From 1967 to 1970, Marotta created large-scale environment works such as "Bosco Naturale-Artificiale" (Natural-Artificial Forest), "Nuovo Paradiso" (New Paradise), "Eden Artificiale" (Artificial Eden) in acrylic, and "Misura Naturale Cava" (Natural Measure Quarry) in fiberglass. In 1968, during the Teatro delle Mostre exhibition at the La Tartaruga Gallery in Rome, he presented "Foresta di menta" (Mint Forest), a multisensory environment artwork in which various elements stimulated all five senses simultaneously. That same year, he participated in "Arte Povera più Azioni Povere" organized by Germano Celant in Amalfi, presenting "Giardino all'italiana" (Italian Garden), an urban intervention consisting of hay bales. Originally, the artwork was intended to be set on fire, transforming into a black line on the asphalt, but for safety reasons, it did not transition from three-dimensionality to a line. In 1969, Marotta exhibited in the show "4 artistes italiens plus que nature" at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Palais du Louvre, Paris, alongside Ceroli, Kounellis, and Pascali. He also dedicated himself to avant-garde cinema and theater, particularly notable for his collaboration with Carmelo Bene. In 1972, he created the scenes and acrylic costume-sculptures for the film "Salomè" and the stage design for "Nostra Signora dei Turchi" (Our Lady of the Turks). In 1987, he designed the scenes and costumes for "Hommelette for Hamlet," earning him the UBU Prize for Best Stage Design in 1988. In the 1980s, Marotta also turned to more traditional materials such as marble, bronze, and oil painting, continuing his exploration of language and the study of light's impact on pictorial works. The artificial light that characterized Marotta's work in the 1960s returned in his early works of the third millennium. Here, LED lights took center stage, as seen in the artworks "Ricognizione virtuale" (Virtual Reconnaissance) of the savannah in 2009 and "Cronotopo virtuale" (Virtual Chronotope), an environmental artwork from 2011. As the artist states, "Digital programs, lasers, LEDs, and colored filters allow us to trace, following the principle of optical fibers, images that are perhaps hallucinatory, nourished by a luminous temperature never related to painting but more significantly optic-spectral (derived from the decomposition of the light spectrum), as Balla would have liked for his 'Compenetrazioni iridescenti' if he had access to the means that I have today. The artistic adventure is not a profession or a career, it is a way of being connected to the destiny of language that allows us to recount facts and stories that are always different." In 2009, his solo exhibition "Eden artificiale" (Artificial Eden) showcased a selection of acrylic sculptures at the MACRO Museum in Rome, along with the installation "Ricognizione virtuale della savana" (Virtual Reconnaissance of the Savannah), a ten-meter-long installation employing lasers and LEDs. In 2011, at the 54th Venice Biennale, Italian Pavilion, Marotta presented "Cronotopo virtuale," an environmental artwork of colored light where the images appeared in their virtuality and immateriality. Here, as Marotta explains, "Colored light, optical color, takes on a physical dimension in place of material color." On October 6, 2012, the exhibition "Gino Marotta Relazioni Pericolose" curated by Laura Cherubini and Angelandreina Rorro opened at the GNAM, National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome. On November 16, 2012, Gino Marotta passed away in Rome. On February 9, 2013, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome hosted the "Per Gino Marotta" study day.