I am delighted to present Remote Lands, an exhibition of twelve recent works by Giuseppe Mercurio, a Canadian artist of Italian background. The paintings evoke remote and rarefied landscapes, mostly x-rays of the soul, inviting us to reflect and suspend disbelief.
Mercurio began as a black-and-white analog photographer, under the guidance of Uno Hoffman, Ryerson University and University of Toronto. Feeling constrained by the medium -and in constant search of a perfect portrait- he gradually switched to acrylic painting.
Painting for him is a training ground, a context for experimentation and investigation of new relations and thoughts. It is an inner practice that can be clearly traced through his recent works. It is an exercise in manipulating mental, physical and virtual space, ultimately creating a surreal dimension at the intersection of waking and dreaming.
As you gradually enter his paintings, the abstract forms and compositions become concrete, richly emotional and always intrinsically personal. In Forget about it, child- like silhouettes appear reduced to their essential outlines, suggesting − in the name of artistic freedom− the steps of an ongoing journey avoiding the looming static grids, a recurrent motif in his paintings. At times they oppressively obstruct any
action by piling up in rigid structures. Or they are limited to almost imperceptible icons serving as reminders of our present captive existence. They suggest demanding regulations unilaterally set by others: the restrictions of the present pandemic to which we can all relate.
In contrast to the rigidity of the omnipresent grids, Mercurio introduces rudimentary bicycles suggesting the necessity of motion in order to keep physically, intellectually and spiritually alive. In The Lights are still on you, the bike is surprisingly suspended in mid air. Imagination allows it to float above ground thus overcoming all the inhibiting impositions of everyday life.
According to the Roman saying Nomen omen, a person’s name is a sign, it speaks for itself. Since Mercurio - in English Mercury- is identified as the fleet-footed messenger of the gods, the artist has to be always on the go, constantly looking for a way to express his creative drive.
The Referee dropped her glasses, with its different degrees of depth and increasingly overwhelming darkness, is emblematic of the unprecedented disconcerting crises which currently upsets any value and conviction.
In What? the artist deliberately includes in the painting a totally illegible and meaningless handwriting, while in I told you so an existential question “Where are we?” is clearly asked, provoking an inevitable inner turmoil in the viewer, expressed with vivid splashes of red and yellow. In a period of global instability -with alternating pandemics, ecological catastrophes and social revolutions- cafés and restaurants, including Mercurio’s, originally intended as places of socialization and interaction have paradoxically become anonymous points where hastily picking up food for take out has become the norm: a truly painful contradiction.
As Aristotle stated, however, even calamities have a soul: in the seemingly silent and artificial quiet of lockdown, the vital heartbeat of art does not stop pulsing. The mandate of art is to intercept this vibration and translate it into visible signs. Each painting by Mercurio in this context strives to become a seismograph, a space of reflection, an incubator of experimentation. During the 2020 historical lockdown due to Covid- 19, Mercurio has rediscovered the freedom of his emotional and creative life as well as
a new relation, long compromised, with nature in the most disparate and contrasting colours.
Lapis blue and purple alternate in Mercurio’s palette with peach and cream, along with a variety of aqua and emerald greens. Some of his works lyrically evoke the light and breeze from the Mediterranean, in particular that part of Italy, Calabria, that gave birth to his parents and ancestors.
The seemingly endless rearrangement of multi-level, textured surfaces in his works are iterated as a mantra always provoking us to awareness and openness of mind as we voyage beyond the surface of things.
In this difficult time of the world, Mercurio’s paintings are an explosion of colour and creative freedom exuding the energy and constructive vitality we so need to build a better future. Mercurio’s work has been recently included in Theorema 3, an Imago Mundi International Artistic Project of the Luciano Benetton Foundation. An exhibition including his work will be hosted at the Museo delle Prigioni in Treviso, Italy, in 2021-22.
Francesca Valente
Imago Mundi Curator for Central and Eastern Canada
& Todi Arts Festival Curator
About Mercurio’s paintings: Always at risk yet under control, exuberant yet with just enough dark in the light
to have weight, entirely persuasive ...
— Barry Callaghan, writer
The Giuseppe Mercurio painting looks great in the living room of our new project in Ontario, Canada.
— Todd Saunders, architect
The work is terrific, dense and textured and idiosyncratic, loose, free, associative and emotionally expressive. It is work that I would be proud to have done myself. A little in that fellow artist, Uno Hoffman’s camp, but his style is highly contagious. It is the freedom and the mark making.
— Stephen Zeifman, artist