Mario Schifano and TV landscapes

Between the 1960s and 1970s, Mario Schifano, photographer and painter, lived in a studio with dozens of televisions always on at low volume, constantly flooding his visual space with an uninterrupted flow of images.

Mario Schifano’s depersonalized works

Schifano was in line with other explorations of the period in that he depersonalized the work, making it no longer the result of unique, unrepeatable, romantic creativity.

Technique: emulsified canvas

Mario Schifano’s isolated the image from a television screen, capturing it by taking a picture of it and then he emulsified it on the canvas finishing it with glaze. Brilliant!

These slightly blurred images, which are not very sharp or bright compared to our current standards, are set within the black circular frame of a cathode-ray tube and hold clocks with precise hour hands (Ora esatta; “Exact time”) and still images of Italian cities with their names written with quotes from art history of the program “Italian 20th-century Masters,” stills of political figures from the news, as well as fragments, enlargements, details, and spots of color. 

 

Schifano’s new expressive language

These experiments with still television images, especially starting in the 1970s, made Mario Schifano – bored with and temporarily distancing himself from painting – into one of the first in the world to interact with different media to create a new artistic language.

With remarkable foresight, Mario Schifano realized that we would be increasingly immersed in the image. 

The artist need not seek inspiration from the outside, because the outside will seek him out.

Television landscapes and computerized canvases (emulsified, to be exact) became part of Mario Schifano‘s expressive language. 

Our catalogue includes two works by Mario Schifano: Paesaggio TV (“TV Landscapes”) and Ora esatta (“Exact Time).

 

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