Conrad Marca-Relli | Il Maestro Irascibile

Conrad Marca-Relli | Il Maestro Irascibile at Galleria Mattia De Luca in Rome - Oct 9 - Dec 4 2021 - curatorial collaboration - Mattia De Luca

Conrad Marca-Relli, aka Corrado Marcarelli, was born in Boston on 5 June 1913 to Italian parents from the Campania region. An indomitable spirit and a tireless traveller, Marca-Relli grew up travelling continuously to Italy, making him perfectly bilingual, literally and artistically speaking.

A lover of the monumentality of Rome, where he worked for several years, and of great Italian Renaissance painting, the Italian-American artist was the true classicist soul of the New York School. The birth of the Eighth Street Club and the organization of the famous 1951 Ninth Street Show is attributable to his fervent temperament. Marca-Relli, imbued not only with classical culture, but also with a certain pragmatism of American origin, undertook from the 1950s a successful and endless path of research into the collage technique.

 © Galleria Mattia De Luca (photo by Daniele Molajoli)

The compositional results of this research would be brought to the ultimate outcome of speaking of his art as “painting-collage”. This modus operandi emerged as a balanced combination of compositional harmony, typical of the European tradition, a spontaneity of gesture, the offspring of Rosenberg’s arena, and Action painting: raw canvases were cut with a razor blade, the strips glued together, unglued, rearranged, superimposed, layered on the support and, finally, repainted in order to harmonize the duality of “positive” and “negative” spaces. It is this primitive encounter of two opposing forces that brings to life Marca-Relli’s canvases, palimpsest collages created by an equally reasoned and “neurasthenic” gesture, a definition given by Afro Basaldella to the artist in a letter sent to his friend and colleague Toti Scialoja.

Always departing from the classical proportions of the wooden mannequin, inseparable companion of his painting, Marca-Relli created a macrocosm of seemingly abstract signs, main elements of his major artistic achievements, on display at Mattia De Luca Gallery.

Click here to discover the exhibition at Galleria Mattia De Luca

Photos by Daniele Molajoli