Marco Tirelli - COLLEZIONE GORI

Marco Tirelli (Roma, 1956 – )

In 1985, Giuliano Gori accepted a proposal from Achille Bonito Oliva, with the collaboration of the La Bezuga printing house owned by Giuliano Allegri. They organized the exhibition “Capodopera,” which brought together all the artists working at the former pasta factory Cerere in Rome. Among them was Marco Tirelli. The exhibition took place at the headquarters of the Tourism Agency in Fiesole, and “Capodopera” took the form of a showcase: every two weeks, each artist presented a work along with drawings and preparatory studies.

In 2009, Giuliano Gori invited Marco Tirelli once again to exhibit his most recent paintings, resulting in the “Intorno al silenzio” (Around Silence) exhibition held on the first floor of the Casapeppe exhibition space. The geometric three-dimensionality that characterizes the artist’s works prompted Giuliano Gori to explore Tirelli’s relationship with sculpture. Upon learning that the painter filled sketchbooks with his ideas for sculptural works, he invited Tirelli to experiment with his first sculptural creation at Celle.

The corten steel forms that resulted from this experiment were the same as those previously depicted in the exhibited paintings and came together to form “Excelle,” a work located in the southeast area of the park. Here, the dark rust oxidation of the iron is in perfect harmony with the almost black pine greenery that characterizes the shady area. With this installation, Tirelli harks back to the mentor who had welcomed him when he was young and at the beginning of his career, into his studio-home in Spoleto.

“[These sketchbooks] are fundamental, as a whole, to fully understanding the depth of an artist’s thought when it is generated by an obsession: constructing a repertoire of images contained within semantic codes that can distill the evocative strength of the simplest geometric forms without, however, taking away their symbolic aura. ‘For me the diaries constitute an open and enigmatic cosmogony, where each element is located in an almost holy border zone,’ emphasizes Tirelli. Sculptures like reifications of imaginary objects, relativesof the toys that De Chirico scattered throughout his paintings, attracted by their ‘rather metaphysical and strange’ forms. Forms that, once they’ve emerged from the suspended and protected dimension of the canvas, acquire an assertive and conscious force, in order to inhabit the landscape as material presences full of awesomeness, with a silent and incisive presence, removed from arrogant and uselessmonumentalism.” Ludovico Pratesi in Marco Tirelli. EXCELLE. Intorno al silenzio,published by Gli Ori, Pistoia, 2009, p.20

Link to the book:
gliori.it

Works by the artist

Excelle

For more info:

marcotirelli.com