Article on Arte by Giulia Oglialoro, 10/2023 (translation)

Marco Emmanuele (Catania, 1986) depicts a restless, primordial sea in Un gesto cinico (A Cynical Gesture), a sea made of high, foaming waves, green waves softened by blue tips or animated by lava-red stains, as if this water had no water, but a water that has no water.
Waves, green waves softened by blue tips or animated by lava-red spots, as if this water had all the potentiality of a life yet to be expressed.
All the potentiality of a life yet to be expressed. The work's protagonist is powdered glass, a material the artist has already used in the ISO series to reproduce the grain of photographic film, so that each subject always appears filtered by a granular veil of distance. The Renaissance imagiers used glass powder to give lustre to the important elements of the composition, but with Emmanuele, this material has become more widespread.
In Emmanuele's work, this material is spread throughout the painting, without hierarchy, inviting us to a focus that must shine everywhere. And if the shape of the work reproduces the outline of two feet - elements of a noble and picturesque tradition, like the sooty feet in the foreground of Caravaggio's Madonna of the Pilgrims - the adjective "cynical" has nothing negative about it: rather, it refers to the ancient philosophical movement that pursued a wandering life free of convention. he gesture alluded to in the title is that of testing seawater with our feet, inviting us to rediscover that ancient vitality which, if we weren't distracted, we might already be discovering within ourselves.

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Quadriennale di Roma, Nicolas Martino, 2023 (translation)

Quadriennale di Roma, 2023
Catania 1986
Lives and works in Rome
Visit to Nicolas Martino's studio October 27, 2023

Marco Emmanuele studied engineering and architecture, first in Catania and then in Rome. In the capital, he decided to devote himself to artistic activity, starting work in the forge that was Opera Paese (a space run by Pietro Fortuna in Pietralata) and which today, under the name Paese Fortuna, is the meeting point for five young talents (Josè Angelino, Alessandro Dandini de Sylva, Luca Grechi, Diego Miguel Mirabella and Emmanuele) and one of the most interesting independent spaces on the Roman scene. A factory, in fact, in which artists share not just space, but an idea of organization and cultural production (note in passing that the refined Aniene editions are based here). Emmanuele has several group and solo exhibitions to his credit, including at least Un raggio verde organized by Operativa Arte Contemporanea in 2021, with a text by Giuseppe Armogida.

The artist's most recent production consists of a series of site-specific canvases and wooden casts in which "landscapes" made of glass dust come to life. A material handcrafted by crushing residues found on beaches. The canvases all bear the same "photographic" title, ISO, followed by a progressive number. These are works of great poetic suggestion that have become progressively more abstract - in the initial phase, certain human traces were still present - and refer on the one hand to the exploration of the artistic possibilities contained in the most unusual and discarded materials (more precisely, they involve the recovery of substances and techniques already used in the Renaissance and gradually forgotten), and on the other to the analysis of the relationship between man and the environment and the impact that the former determines on the latter. There's an artisanal dimension to Emmanuele's work - the slowness and care required to prepare the material - which is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating and original features of this artist, who thus seems to propose a kind of everyday resistance to the rushing syndrome to which digital society makes us prisoners. Sculpting, sanding and polishing coincide here with an attempt to force the too-tight meshes of a time that's slipping away, to "crystallize" a lasting dimension in which to live and not just survive
 

From a conceptual point of view, poetics develops a relationship with memory that makes us think of something similar to what Gianni Vattimo said about the relationship that binds us to our cultural heritage, both on a collective and personal level: in the secularized age in which we have to live, we can only "remember" what has been, in a link with the past from which we can never fully recover, just as we can never really recover from an illness which, when it passes through us, leaves traces on our bodies forever. We are then the slow stratification of these traces, our unconscious not a smooth, polished surface, but rough and irregular - like the surface of these works - an extension reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges when he said that we are our memory, a heap of broken mirrors.

Also worth mentioning as one of the most interesting parts of Emmanuele's work are the Drawing Machines, machines, sometimes of environmental dimensions, intended for the creation of collective works. Built mainly from wood, or at least traditional materials, these machines embody the so-called "collective intelligence" we experience in our work and daily lives (just think of the network and our appliances).

It's interesting to note here a contradiction between the industrial "hardness" of these modern machines and the "softness" of digital forms of life. A contradiction that does not refer to a form of nostalgia, but probably to that unresolved tension in which our condition always consists, oscillating between a taste for the happy security of childhood and the painful but extraordinary adventure of coming of age. It would undoubtedly be interesting if Emmanuele, who recently organized a fine exhibition at the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere as part of a collaborative effort with the Drawing Machines, were to insist more fully on exploring all its as yet unspoken potentialities.

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Marco Emmanuele, Ialurgia, Giuseppe Armogida, 2022 (translation)

To grasp what's at stake (I'm careful not to say what's essential) in Marco Emmanuele's works in this exhibition (and perhaps in his entire output), we have to start with the titles more - or, at least, before - than with the content of his works. Titles that are like encrypted banknotes, which Marco, hands behind his back so as not to be noticed, hands to the viewer and then runs off; or like communications whispered or transmitted by gesture and immediately forgotten. ISO appears in the title of these works, a sort of "in-variant", followed by a series of numbers. (Only neophytes will fail to understand that this process of varied iteration is a veritable trademark of Emmanuele's method, who, like a refined composer, generally creates multiple variations on a theme, creating works that are elusive in their uniqueness. serial, just think of the Machines à dessiner series...). Anyone familiar with photography knows that ISO indicates the "sensitivity" of photographic film (needless to say, the film in question is the iris of Emmanuelle's eye), i.e. its speed of reaction to light. The amount of light that the film - or sensor, in the case of a digital camera - can absorb in a given time depends on the ISO value. And, as a result, increasing ISO is like asking the camera to do its utmost to try to "see" in low-light conditions. And see what, if not its time, the time we live in?
Giorgio Agamben's well-known text Qu'est-ce que le contemporain (What is the contemporary?) comes forcefully to mind. - a text very dear to Marco Emmanuele's heart - in which it is said that a contemporary is one who keeps his gaze fixed on his time, in order to perceive not its lights, but its obscurities. A contemporary, in other words, is one who knows how to see the darkness of his time, the darkness of the present. Admittedly, this requires a particular skill, which consists in neutralizing the lights that come from the time to discover its particular darkness, which nevertheless cannot be separated from these lights. In short, a contemporary is someone who doesn't let himself be blinded by the lights of the century, and knows how to see in them the unavoidable part of the shadow, their intimate darkness; the contemporary is the one who receives the full force of the ray of darkness that comes from his time; the one who manages to show in complete transparency the opacity of life.

But the darkness of the present that the "contemporary" perceives is not an absence of light at all, but rather a light that, because of its great speed, although directed towards him, cannot reach him and moves infinitely away from him. . Light that always arrives either too early or too late. Like the "green ray", the title Marco Emmanuele has rightly chosen for his exhibition: it's this green glow - first recounted by Jules Verne and then filmed by Éric Rohmer - that can appear on the horizon in a fraction of a second. When it appears, the person who sees it acquires an extreme lucidity, enabling him or her to know instantly his or her own feelings and those of a loved one.
With these considerations in mind, isn't it entirely appropriate to define these works by Emmanuele as "contemporary"? Don't they all have an internal mismatch, reflected in the shades of color? In their attempt to fix once and for all that light-darkness which, arriving suddenly, strikes and stuns, are they not all constitutionally ahead of themselves and, precisely for this reason, always behind?
The fact remains that to "photograph" this elusive light, Marco Emmanuele is obliged to increase the ISO values. But there's a problem: increasing ISO values has the downside of adding "noise" to the photo. In fact, when you set a higher sensitivity than normal, you amplify the light signal; and when a signal of any kind is amplified, there's a threshold beyond which a disturbance is created. In our case, this "noise" translates into a kind of "graininess" of the image. The image becomes less defined and takes on "spots" of different colors. If I had to name a sound equivalent to the kind of noise that Emmanuelle's works evoke in me, I'd immediately, and without much thought, choose Spiderland by Slint. If only because this is the album that was playing in the background the last time Marco took me for a drive. An album from 1991, in which the band's hardcore fury explodes into slowcore and post-rock. An album in which rhythms are slowed down, harmonies clash, arrangements are minimal and atmospheres are rarefied, which is precisely what happens in Emmanuele's work.

But we must be careful: noise should not be understood as a lack of information or structure, but as an excess of structure and complexity, as a continuous superposition of incomposable elements, as a density of information. The interesting aspect of noise is in fact its disorganizing power: in other words, by pushing us to decipher the information it contains, noise interferes with our predefined perceptual-cognitive schemas, with our familiar classifications, and thus calls into question the way in which we relate to experience. Noise, in short, forces the viewer to work in assemblages, in Marco's case on the invisible connections of these "shards" that circulate on the canvas as if in a single infinite circular memory. Far be it from me to pigeonhole Marco Emmanuele's work into particular categories, but I don't think I'd dare define him as a "topographer", one of the most precise, whose tracings - always balanced between insignificance and meaningful formalization - are disarmingly simple, as delicate as a fairy tale. We don't quite know "what" they want to show (never reproduce!): a terrestrial world? an aquatic world? mountains, volcanoes, caves? the sea tickled by the whims of the tide? lush vegetation animated by the wind? prehistoric animals? submarine fantasies? The choice is left to the viewer's perception. But, in any case, they are so "phenomenological" that they appear as "virtual" clouds, almost electronic, like those Wim Wenders tried to reproduce in the HD dreams of Until the End of the World. Fragments of glass, grains of sand: remnants, remnants of a dream world, inhabiting a plane of immanence without axis or center, without right or left, without up or down, in which there are no defined horizons, only the endless and often unexpected adventure of seeing another horizon. Fragments that address no one, no longer address no one, and yet genetically hark back to the symptoms of their original world, to something immemorial, archaic. Oui, Marco Emmanuele est un topographe au regard cristallin et hallucinatoire, plongé dans des tempêtes de verre. L’allusion au merveilleux roman d’Ernst Jünger, Dans les tempêtes d’acier, qui raconte les expériences de l’écrivain et philosophe allemand dans les tranchées pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, est évidemment intentionnelle. J’aime penser en effet que, tout comme dans son roman, Jünger adopte le regard froid de l’entomologiste pour décrire les horreurs de la guerre, dans laquelle les opposés
se heurtent durement et des abîmes sombres s’ouvrent aux côtés des valeurs suprêmes, dans ses œuvres Marco Emmanuele regarde avec lucidité l’obscurité aveuglante de la réalité, fragmentée et tranchante comme des morceaux de verre, nous encourageant à être à notre tour des observateurs, à la recherche de cette lumière qui, bien que résonnant en couleurs, tend à nous échapper, sans jamais oublier que chacun de nos regards, bien que partiels et irréductiblement manquant, il peut ouvrir les horizons les plus larges.​