Mario Schifano, IL SUO ROSARIO

Room 7
Invited by Andrea Mastrovito

The relationship between Mario Schifano and the Modenese art dealer Emilio Mazzoli has been fundamental for both of them since the 1980s. The 700 photos that were presented were taken from the personal collection of the gallery owner, who bought several thousand from Schifano. The famous photos taken on television, printed and repainted, fully express the artist’s poetics and pictorial practice in the last decade of his life: his passion for the media and his visual bulimia. As his historic secretary, Renzo Colombo, recalls: “He spent a lot of time working on the photographs he took on television, which he then cut out and coloured. With the photos Mario detached himself from everything and everyone. For a while he used up twenty rolls of film a day – I used to take twenty rolls a day to the print shop! He would say: “This is now the real quality work, not the pictures”.
As his friend Roberto Ortensi, long-time assistant to gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend, points out: “Everything started with images photographed on television, often out of focus or with strange blue flashes, figures that evoke an elsewhere, something else, on which he would sometimes intervene with colour. When he intervened he did so almost as a tribute to painting, they were like signs, a sort of reminder.

Photo retouching was a fast, yet mysterious occupation. He was able to bring out an unseen, unperceived intensity and depth from the images. It was like the work of a diviner. He would revisit with paint the images of reality that came into his home from the television. For a while, these photos would remain on the work table, stacked and divided into genres”.Mazzoli concludes: “As you know, Mario was not interested in the sacred, but for me his work was a bit like a religion and reminded me of cloistered nuns who always pray to achieve ataraxia. He did the same, he worked all the time, or drew or painted, his work was like a form of purification. Of course, he had this secularism of wanting everything and everything now. But these photos were his rosary: he always had a bunch of them at hand and while he was talking to you or on the phone he would paint on them, crumpling them up one after the other”.

Mario Schifano was born in Homs (Libya) in 1934. He died in Roma in 1998.