Sguardo Invisibile II - Luis Marino

Sguardo Invisibile II

VENICE, INDECISIVE ATLANTIS…

Una città invisibile… uno sguardo visibile… (An invisible city… a visible look…)

VENICE AGAIN, THROUGH THE LOOK OF LUIS MARINO.

This magical city which we rediscover through the eyes of Luis Marino, is an extension of that ‘Città invisibile’ he presented in his first exhibition. There, the city was represented through ‘lo sguardo visibile’. It is presented again to the lovers of art with an expansion of the themes. This makes the magical city of the waterways more visible and closer to us.

It is not a coincidence that different organizations, all of them prestigious, have asked the artist to show us something more about everything he ‘felt and heard’ in his long walk along the streets, the waterways, the bridges of Venice. This is a personal route, where sensitivity and imagination triumphed over hackneyed subjects which sometimes inconvenience the city of the Lagoon and don’t let us perceive its particular, unrepeatable atmosphere.

We sense something more of that mystery that surrounds Venice. A mystery increased by that silence, that absence of noises that prevail in any other city of the world, so rushed, so chaotic that won’t let you look inside, perceive other sounds, ‘listen to the places’. Because the places, the stones, the waters speak too…

Everyday life: a door, where someone has left the morning newspaper, with the news of the world beyond the water, beyond the silence.

A traveller stands under the arcade of St. Mark’s Square, with its colour marble paving, remains of ancient splendour when the Serene Republic of Venice, melting pot of East and West, reigned among the big powers of the time; when the trade, the coming and going of the sailors, the ‘botteghe’ (workshops) of the artisans converted the raw materials which came from beyond the sea into artistic wonders.

Effect of light and shade in the waterways. The water is still, like a mirror reflecting the large windows, the doors, the people walking along the narrow streets. When you look up above, the towers, the churches, the bell towers seem to warp, to prove that it is true that the city of the waters can vanish under them. There are a thousand little, tiny islands, connected by the bridges in a totally unreal route, which has finally confirmed that wonder we admire today fearing its disappearance.

Life in Burano, another island which resists the tides, teetering too, coloured at dawn, as if it was challenging the fog, a sign of identity for the waters to respect it, while many diligent hands are embroidering the fabrics, now as in days gone by, at the door of the houses.

In this city, which emerges from waters thanks to an unequalled architectural miracle and which stands up, century after century, stubbornly, going up and down like an indecisive Atlantis, Luis Marino, painter, sculptor, versatile artist, has found an inspiration full of intensity, of feeling, of plasticity and he shares it with us in this exhibition full of colour and art.

In this city, which sometimes wants to ‘go up’, its famous acqua alta, and sometimes sinks slowly, we identify the to-and-fro of life, the movement of emotions that constitute us, the route we cover until we are able to give expression to those moments of inspiration which emerge surprisingly, when we live, when we look around attentively and on tenterhooks.

Nobody will be indifferent to these reproductions of people and of special moments, in special days, in a city, without doubts, unrepeatable in its beauty, in its decadence and its resurgence, like a Phoenix, again and again from the waters that want to cover it and sweep it along – like the Atlantis from the mythology – to the bottom of the sea.

Ludic moments are the ones we spend when we put on different clothes, almost another personality in those days devoted to merrymaking, when everybody shows themselves, adopting other behaviours, restricting themselves to the physical expression of something immaterial, a subtle game of postures and, most of all, of looks. That describes very well the nature of Venetian Carnival, slow, deliberate, thought, like everything that moves in the city.

There are a lot of very funny carnivals. But only in Venice, this pagan festival without limits adopts the air of plasticity, of order in disorder, of ‘applied art’: the human being transforming, making themselves up, dressing up, getting dressed, laughing, looking at one another and letting their imagination run riot. A Carnival which could only express itself like this in a city like Venice, where time has another rhythm, where silence – the absence of the common noises of life on solid ground – makes people live magical moments, moments of inner ‘diving’, even in Carnival, which seems to be a festival of noise, of ephemeral and nudity.

Every mask, every lady and every ‘cavaliere’ (gentleman) carries in their look and in their make up, the reflection of what they would like to be, of what they are and of what they want people to see in them.

Moments of life of a great beauty, of an exquisite plasticity, and to which Luis Marino, man of a marked artistic sensitivity, has managed to give expression going around that ‘invisible city’ with another ‘visible look’. That curious, attentive, deep look has been his inspiration at every moment, every time he came across people whose looks told him so many things and whose costumes said other things too, people to whom he stopped to talk, to discuss, to know… an ‘attimo fuggente’ (fleeting moment) trying to last forever.

These are some personal impressions, but they are also universal, from an always great Venice, where everything is possible, even the impossible and where all of us should, at least once in life, go with an attentive look, to feel the thousands of feelings which can emerge from it.

This new exhibition of Luis Marino, who went to Venice in a trip of feelings, gives us an extraordinary opportunity to come closer to this place and to discover something as intangible as beauty and life in a decadent city…

A city whose own decadence has become a myth and a feature that whoever lives it they can’t forget.

Venice’s spell lies in this explosion of feelings it causes to everyone who approaches the city, and when an artist is our ‘cicerone’ (guide), is when we really feel something else, something difficult to forget because it is part of our own feelings.

I know that Luis Marino still keeps a lot of material to discover… a lot of feelings to show us, a lot of art in these photographs which are the reflection of his special look… LO SGUARDO VISIBILE. He wanted to share all this with us and to make us accomplices of that attentive, clever, full of sense LOOK.

THE ART OF BEING ABLE TO SEE THE INVISIBLE is clearer than ever in this exhibition… and we know that there is still more.

Thank you, my friend, friend of everyone who visits this exhibition. Thank you for giving us this chance of filling with feelings something – photography – which is the accurate reflection of life, of a reality which, with your look, is covered in party.

HOORAY FOR THE VISIBLE LOOK IN THE INVISIBLE CITY!!

Maria Pina Caruso. 2007