INGENIOUS INTERLUDES IN THE NEW WORK OF OSVALDO MARISCOTTI
No one creates as gorgeous a surface as Osvaldo Mariscotti whose newest paintings are abstract in the old sense of the word. The artist's works consist of quickly applied thin rivulets, ingenious interludes of thin painterly strokes using effervescent colors - particularly pink and red, and blue striations - that are immediately seductive. With prolonged viewing you begin to see that these taffy colors are saturated with light. The most striking aspect of this new work is how the seductive colors act as a foil for Mariscotti's main concern: how to make paintings that seem purposely "undone" through the visually connecting of what appear to be interstitial spaces within the open whole of each work (which usually colonizes the central blank area of the artist's paintings).
Mariscotti's new paintings have colors-beautiful, off key, hothouse colors that fail somewhere between the palettes of de Kooning and the designer Romeo Gigli. The artist is an intense surface-worrier and segmenter of planes and no wonder: his new paintings are bold experiments in the structuring of space without using the normal emphasizing the traditional methodologies applied to the surface. Using very little paint applied so as to signal the greatest amount of surface tension spread out against the pictorial planes, the artist's paintings are ethereally transparent. The work, liquid to the point of formlessness, seems to be on the verge of purposeful disintegration.
Mariscotti's new work, for the first time, has eliminated from any literal references to representational reality from his work. In its place he has made as the theme of his work an investigation of the underpinnings, the structural support surfaces of his pictorial spaces; at the same time as he seems to be on the verge of dismantling them.
The analytic and the sensual in his paintings, two oppositional qualities, are kept in harmonious balance as the artist deploys the grid and the square to demarcate passageways and container edges of his spaces. These platonic structures pervade the new paintings. Using the grid format as understructure, and then tantalizingly applying the coloristic skeins that remind the viewer of stretched putty or skin, adds a note of extraordinarily baroque elasticity to Mariscotti's abstract images.
In effect, Mariscotti's images are vestigial ones on the verge of on the cusp between meltdown and metamorphosis-a liminal state that resists identifiable locus. If we were to look at these new works closely we are immediately struck with their ambiguity - as if these works were testing the eye and challenging it with what it can see (or not see) over time. Transparency, fluidity, permeability, and structured etherialization are the hallmarks of Osvaldo Mariscotti's new works which exemplify the imagination taking flight and finding a resonance in what Nietzsche called the "lightness" of things. Here, the eye finds a type of plenitude in the scattered, unorganized distribution of light and paint that is yet still, somehow enclosed, held in check, totalized and grounded by the systematized matrix of verticals and horizontals found in each painting, each of which is buoyed by a saturated sense of indeterminacy as counterpoints to the central voids felt in each work.
Mariscotti deftly plays with oppositions here: on the one hand applying the common identification of lightness with transparency and immateriality, on the other hand finding a way to root the ideal into the earth through the guttural expression of his paint handling, through the energetics of the mortal body's hand. The result is an intense experience which visually insinuates a presencing of an incipient expansion principle on the verge of filling pictorial space. At the same time as this transcendent intention is felt and seen as antithetical intentional painterly aspect comes into play. An anti-illusionism is now evident; the intense physicality of the painter's brush strokes heightens the materiality of the pictorial plane as well as the facticity of the artist's working procedures. The result offers a distanced, conceptual reading to the work.
Osvaldo Mariscotti's hybrid painting is intriguing as it is held in a state of suspension between two conditions: at a remove from transcendence while allowing the viewer to participate in what might be considered a perceptual aspect of transcendence through the use of boundless infinities of white expanses. Thus, while the artist's work stresses the simultaneity of illusionism and sheer facticity, this interwoven doubled presence and anti-presence in each painting itself furnishes the idea of an enduring present, the contrast between change and the unchanging, between time and eternity. By structuring his work as neither purely aesthetic nor intellectual, it places the intentionality of the artist within the mid-realm of the conceptual and the phenomenal and halfway between geometric abstraction and gestural expressionism. In seeking the ultimate affinity between the morphological laws of organic and inorganic nature Osvaldo Mariscotti expresses a remarkable integrative ideal while producing unforgettable images to the delight of his viewers.
