Osvaldo Mariscotti: the new visual Suprematism
Many artists choose to paint the beautiful; others instead, decide to break down the sign, thus entering in the new universe of non-representation. I would like to introduce, therefore, the visual analysis of Osvaldo Mariscotti, to that school of thought, born exactly one hundred years ago, based on the instinct of Kazimir Malevich, in collaboration with the poet Mayakovsky, which took the name of Suprematism. Malevich argued that the modern artist had to look up to an art finally freed from practical and aesthetic purposes, and thus work only favoring a pure plastic sensitivity. He also argued, that painting until then, had not been more than the aesthetic representation of reality and that instead the end of the artist should be to seek a path that would lead to the essence of art: art for art's sake.
The word "Suprematism" derives from the author's concept of "pure" art: according to Malevich, abstract art was superior to figurative art, since in a figurative painting we see represented an object or living form, while on a supremacist work there is only one element: the color that is expressed in the best possible way in an abstract painting. At the beginning of the Russian artistic Avant-garde there was, as in many other European countries, the desire to rebel against the teachings of the Academy, considered obsolete and no longer able to express many aspects of modern society, radically transformed by the industrial revolution. Cubism had introduced the idea of reducing the shapes of the outside world to their essential elements and to present the subject of a painting in order to highlight the inevitable flatness of the canvas. The cubist style reaches Russian artists thanks to numerous Western Contemporary art exhibitions staged in Moscow from 1912 onwards. Malevich's Suprematism takes the fundamental aspects of cubist painting to their extremes. Malevich believed that it was possible to free art from its bond to represent figures and objects with recognizable images: not having to worry about depicting external reality, art would be able to develop its own proper language and create new realities "no less significant than the realities found in nature."
For Malevich, the most basic elements of Suprematist art were the straight line and the square, which reflect the emphasis he placed on the shapes produced by man rather than those existing in nature. These elements are taken over by Osvaldo Mariscotti. His works are very significant, made from the decomposition of figures such as the rectangle, which is then decomposed into its essential colored lines on a black background.
Mariscotti's search puts him in the context of geometric conceptualism: that reality of thought that holds figuration as malaise and searches for synthesis, as a model to pursue. The many trips throughout Europe, South America and lastly the United States have strongly influenced his way of thinking and seeing art. I would like to define Mariscotti as the "engineer of the sign."
His art examines the "non reality" and breaks it down into geometric shapes. An art, that of Osvaldo Mariscotti, which starts from Malevich's black square to arrive at the development of a new code, based on a succession of figures and lines whose main goal is to give rise to a new communication language. Mariscotti thus creates the new Bible of Geometric art. A Bible that has its own alphabet, made up of geometric sign variables.
