On December 11th, 2021, at 6:00 PM, the opening of Marco Ferri’s solo exhibition Tra le Righe (Between the Lines) will take place at “La Fonderia” Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Florence (Via della Fonderia 42R).
The exhibition, curated by Barbara Aniello, brings together the recent works of this constantly evolving artist. Trained at Sebastian Matta’s school-laboratory, Ferri debuted as an experimental artist in ceramic art, before exploring landscape painting and eventually arriving at geometric abstraction. Always balancing on the edge between painting and sculpture—so much so that he earned the title of “pittoscultore” (painter-sculptor) (Carli, 2010)—he developed motifs that aligned him with Tinguely and his useless machines, later verging on Minimalism and Arte Povera. In recent years, Ferri has vibrated primarily between the Dadaist combination of found objects and the playful conceptualism of his wordplay. In reality, all labels elude the artist’s free creativity; he remains consistently true to himself, preserving his own distinct stylistic signature.
The exhibition, which will remain open until January 8th, 2022, gathers works that obsessively operate within the “atavistic terrain of the balance between the horizontal and the vertical.” However, “Ferri’s work is not a playful amusement between the explicit and the hidden, to which the motto he chose as the title of the exhibition, ‘Tra le righe’, ironically alludes.” (Aniello, 2021). The viewer, in fact, is invited to look beyond the forest of lines and strokes to grasp—within the timbre masterfully modulated by the painter—the essence of an underlying dialogue that emerges only upon a second glance. Within the harmonic-melodic score of the orthogonal play of strokes, it is precisely the timbre that embodies the key to interpreting the works, which preserve deep and layered messages, akin to a Bachian Fugue, as Barbara Aniello writes in her presentation, rich with chromatic-musical parallelisms.
