Once Before reveals an important moment in Andrea Marchesini’s artistic career through a collection of 10 artworks – entirely unpublished and never before released from the artist’s studio – in which one can observe and understand a germinal phase of his artistic language.
The creation of these artworks, conceived in the same period and of the same format, is almost sacred; a sort of meditation, a calm navigation in the flow of the subconscious in which painting, an infallible methodology for Andrea Marchesini, aims to find by creating.
In this way, both his subjects and the process seem to suggest a kind of transcendence that can be found within, rather than without. In each artwork, colour becomes amniotic fluid in which forms, interpretable as the nascent ego, slowly begin to exist in the never-ending attempt to define their own identity.
Within the gallery space, through the recurrence of a shape reminiscent of evolving primordial cells, a calm atmosphere is created that generates and reveals clues.
“Everything is a clue before it is a phenomenon. The milder the clue, the more sense it acquires, since it indicates an origin. Assumed as origins, all clues seem to continually, tirelessly give rise to the tale” [Gaston Bachelard “La poétique de I’espace, 1957].
Quiet and premonitory, each artwork holds the soul of an embryonic research that the artist would increasingly begin to encourage, and from which would emerge the most personal figurative universe.
