Although Sicilian by birth, Elio Marchegiani is nevertheless Tuscan in every respect as regards his artistic training as he and his family had moved to Livorno in 1934. spending his childhood and youth there, he began painting as a child, developing his enthusiasm by teaching himself and did not attend any art school or academy. On his family’s urging, Marchegiani did classical studies and then enrolled at the University of Pisa’s Faculty of Law. Forced to find a job after his father's death in 1951, he began working in advertising and thus had the opportunity to combine his work and art until 1970 when Marchegiani assumed the painting chair at the Urbino Academy of Fine Arts, where he was also director from 1983 to 1988. From the beginning, his artistic work has always been full of a constant ironic-transgressive tension that has sometimes led to provocative happenings, as in the 1969 case of 9000 live flies. Marchegiani’s first solo exhibition was held at the Galleria Giraldi in Livorno in 1958. The following year, he participated in Rome’s 8th Quadriennale. In the 1960s, he took part in the Florentine experiment of Gruppo 70, while simultaneously having such important personal exhibitions as the 1966 one at Milan’s Galleria Apollinaire and the 1967 one at the Obelisco in Rome. Since that time, he organized dozens of solo exhibitions and is credited with participating in numerous national and international reviews, including the 1968, 1972, and 1986 Venice Bienniales. Starting from informal suggestions, he progressively directed his work towards areas of experimental research. Despite references to such twentieth-century artistic experiences as Balla’s speed of movement, Duchamp’s provocations, and Fontana’s spatialism, Marchegiani’s interest focused mainly on the links between science and image development, whose objective and material consistency is actually the basis of all his work.
(Color weight - plaster support) By "weight", Elio Marchegiani means the distillation of color, its breath on the painting’s surface where it grows by the smallest steps, perfected in the attention to the creation’s qualitative yield, as always indispensable in his works. Indeed, it is in this type of work that the care provided by the artist in the creative act emerges most clearly, which is for him an important moment of conceptual exercise, equal to the germinal moment of the idea. Indeed, the idea cannot be left to itself and the artist must also be completely the creator, not ceding direct involvement in any of the gestational phases until the work is completed, not being content with its conception, no matter how evocative and dazzling it may be. In fact, Marchegiani’s motto has been "doing by thinking", which can also be seen in the "Grammature di colore". Although having rejected movement, he remains convinced of the project’s absolute necessity that, above all, is respect for size, compositional balance, and the precise control of the color's weight shift. It is to liberate the indications of a fundamentally new painting by aspiring to an extreme synthesis of Renaissance geometry and reaffirming its idea of planning, which conceives of developing thought in terms of the practical and effective completion of the artwork.
mm 1000x1000