OSVALDO MARISCOTTI: INTERIOR LANDSCAPES AND THE AMBITIOUS EYE
There is enormous ambition in Osvaldo Mariscotti's paintings and this ambition immediately challenges the mind and eye. In these exuberantly colorful and densely textured paintings Mariscotti's great gift is his ability to create panoramic pictorial fields that teem with paradoxical elements of intimate subjectivity. These works, though, while heavily expressionistic are redolent with intentions of expressing aspects of the sublime. Also, a constant sense of flux and reflux is sensed in these deeply-felt works and I would attest that their persuasive powers are sensed primarily through their atavistic and vitalistic energies.
The vibrancy that results in Mariscotti's work is a residual effect of a combination of factors. The most considered is the artist's seeming passion to depict an interplay between two and three dimensionalized realities whose charged pictorial fields contains both the seeds of nascent world or exploding worlds. Additionally, a sense of palpable mystery abides where the profoundest knowledge of the unimaginable - through imaginary gaps - seems to be laid bare. It is through these gaps, these near-mystical voids, that the central intentionality of Mariscotti's works - to unveil an aspect of sublimity - is carried forth. He attempts to depict a sublime sense of magnitude in which the viewer's mind substitutes his own infinity for the apparent phenomenon of infinity before him.
It is incontestable the more one looks and ponders Osvaldo Mariscotti's work that painting for this artist is a vessel that is meant to hold in delicate balance two types of logically incommensurable infinities, one of subjectivities and one of objectivities each oscillating intermittently, back and forth, each held captive in passages of heavily impastoed paint, giving way, in turn, to other areas that are loosely and lightly drawn. This major motif is held in place, formally, with other smaller concerns and key notes: an inversion of exterior and interior spaces, that is, spaces clearly meant to be viewed as the imaginary from above, the birds eye view, as well as the vision of abstracted schematized reality seen, for example, on map projections.
Another incisive aspect of Mariscotti's work is his use of the borders of his works, in which both the tops and bottom edges are used as subliminal repoussoir effects in order to lead the eye into the heart, the centers, and the depths of each of his paintings. The result is a sensation of unapproachability, of unattainability, of there being something out of reach, out of bounds, an excess of some kind. And the result is a balance of inner and outer worlds in conjunction with the exterior and interior spaces which are the central configurations within the artist's pictorial fields. Were we to focus particularly on those areas we would notice that an integration occurs there, particularly in the integration of edge and center; the crucial aspect which emerges out of this fusion of forces is a fresh relation of sublimity.
Formally speaking Mariscotti's realizes a perceptual depth in which a naturalizing sublime occurs as well as a sense of loftiness or height. Through this an idealistic sublime emerges in his work, both residing in and coming forth out of the same dimension of verticality but interpreted differently in each work. Thus, the artist participates as a gatekeeper to experiences which resemble a journey, taking the viewer through pathways of emotional intensities through downward interiorized psychic regions as well as through compositional structures suggesting upward cathartic release. Mariscotti's intense use of brilliant and saturated coloration continually emphasizes these movements enabling an overall motif to take place in which resolution and irresolution - a ceaseless unfolding - takes hold.
In this place the artist offers us the spaces of constant renewal and transcendence. There, imaginary recesses give way to expansive and unlimited realms of the psyche. All of these spaces take place for the self of find elements of sublimity as it circumnavigates through Osvaldo Mariscotti's interior landscapes.
