Marco Casentini, THE PLAYROOM

Room 20

«When I was invited to take part in this exhibition it was immediate for me what I was going to make: a room. The room carries with it the concept of time, and I immediately liked to think that whatever room I was assigned, it would be a room where some child had certainly played in the past, spending happy moments there. It is not important for me to verify the truth, for me it is so… In the interior of the room I wanted to paint the walls with colours that for me express the joy of living; where there is a child there is always happiness. I would like those who enter the playroom to experience a moment of joy, even if only for a moment. If this were to happen, I would have achieved my goal.»Marco Casentini

«He is fascinated by the use of colour in architecture, by the concept of architectural geometry, in which the blocks that make up buildings are translated by him into rectangles of colour. It is a process of dismantling the frills, the useless superstructures, which only complicate things and weigh down the skeleton of the work. The operation of reducing architectural space to its minimum, which has a moral value in itself, to be understood in a broad sense of course, leads to a sort of suspension of time, with a metaphysical flavour. Suspension that leads to an intrinsic silence and which is in turn related to the strong colours of contemporaneity, giving rise to a balanced oxymoron of a linguistic and speculative nature.»
Angela Madesani

THE ARTIST

Marco Casentini was born in La Spezia in 1961. He lives in Los Angeles. After attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, he held his first solo exhibition at the Nanu Gallery in Lucerne in 1983. He has travelled extensively in Europe and America. In 1997 he made his first wall painting at MAPP, Museo d’Arte Paolo Pini in Milan. In 1998 he had his first exhibition in the United States at the Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica, where he returned in 2002, 2003 and 2005. At the same time, he collaborated with the galleries Brian Gros Fine Arte in San Francisco, Scott White Contemporary Art in La Jolla and Klein Art Works in Chicago. In 2004 he participated in the Paint on Metal exhibition at the Tucson Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Arizona and in the same year he exhibited at the Museum für Konkrete Kunst in Ingolstadt, Germany. In 2005 he received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in New York. In 2008 the Museum für Konkrete Kunst in Ingolstadt and the Torrance Art Museum in California hosted a solo exhibition. He was invited to exhibit at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in Bakersfield, California in 2010.