Mario Formica

This new stage in Mario Formica’s activity is the fruit of a contemplated synthesis of previous experiences put into effect in his Exhibitions in Venice, Florence, Rome and others.
He has developed a very personal poetry of the material in his works on show, creating painted sculptures of great fascination and evocative capability, much of which is due to his former experience as a theatrical scenographer.
Plurimaterial Art belongs to one of the most original and prolific branches of Italian Contemporary Art, whose origins can be found to date back to the beginning of the past century, in the first aesthetic researches carried out by Umberto Boccioni and some Futurists. ”Plurimaterial Art isn’t a technique but, like painting and sculpture, is a means of artistic expression.” (Enrico Prampolini)-
The sculptures exhibited are expressions of this poetry of material, revaluating discarded objects and all that our way of life, besieged by the new and superfluous, no longer permits us to use. It isn’t chance that great part of the materials employed in Formica’s sculptures come from computers. The symbol object of technologic civilization is also the first victim of this endless race for innovation in our way of living, only to became obsolete in no time.
The caducity and precariousness of our culture based on the consumption of new products generates a constituent element in the poetic world of artists and the only way of saving them from the obscurity of oblivion is to incorporate them in their works of art. Their salvation in a way of ennobling them and in so doing we also ennoble those who created and used them, in a will to arrest, at least for a brief time, their memory.
Among this technological waste emerges lost fragments of shipwrecks of long ago, small figures on gold bases and ghosts of the oneiric Middle Ages recalled to mind and proposed in a very personal re-elaborated visionary form.
These plurimaterial structures are inhabited by androgynous transparent characters, strange figures plunged into timeless atmospheres, in a suspended space. These asexual inhabitants who sometimes have traits of infantile physiognomy, and at other times not even the slightest hint, live in intervening spaces of reality where they seem to look upon us with the detachment of a Byzantine Icon.
From the evocative contrast between electronic material and the populated tables of slender ghosts, from the two contrasting elements of aesthetic and matter, is born the suspended expressive equilibrium out of time, the arcane fascination and entailment of these sculptures.