Marco Papini
Self-taught artist, born in Milan in 1958, he completed technical studies in Turin and began his pictorial career at the end of a management career in the pleasure yachts industry where, for many years, he worked in industrial design. Always passionate about photography and art, he is fascinated by cubism, surrealism, the informal, the "pop" era, sources of inspiration for his works. He focuses his works mainly on the female figure, on faces, on family affections, on classic works of the past, on landscapes. They appear as if they were moments captured by the photographic shot and transferred to the canvas, like images sometimes in solarized black and white, sometimes coloured. His works exhibited in Italy and abroad have received the approval of the public and critics and are published in art magazines and catalogues.
In June 2023, he won 1st prize at the "Artisti d'Italia" exhibition held at the Villa Reale in Monza and presented by the art critic Prof. Vittorio Sgarbi, who wrote, "In many ways, Papini's path is exemplary among those undertaken by participants in exhibitions of the Artisti d'Italia type. Papini did not train in an academy or other artistic schools, carrying out professional activities in the field of pleasure yacht design. The passion for art, that of others, then also that produced on one's own behalf, he developed independently by learning about Cubism as well as foreign and Italian Pop Art, from which it is presumable that he derived the photographic transfer procedure with which he is provided a starting point for the most characteristic pictorial elaborations. "Il Giardino del Bene e del Male" (The Garden of Good and Evil) confirms Papini's graphic predisposition, again a daughter of Pop Art, favoring the treatment of the subject according to an advanced frontal plane with respect to which the one behind compresses forward as if wanting to reduce the depth of field as much as possible, to use photographic terminology. It is essentially a close-up and rather varied floral composition, spread along two panels of equivalent dimensions, in which the individual elements follow one another like islands with a defined outline whose simplified interiors differ chromatically, with a certain balance between warm and cold tones emerging by contrast from a dark background. In the intricate and planar mass of plants, one can barely distinguish a pollinating insect, which is important in Papini's expressive intentions