Pèlagos
Marco La Rosa
Text by Jessica Bianchera
24 june > 18 september 2021
In the third solo exhibition by A + B gallery entitled Pèlagos (Πέλαγος: open sea, other sea) Marco La Rosa presents a wide selection of unpublished works – not only sculptural – which reinterpret the most epic and paradigmatic of travel, the journey towards excellence: Odysseus’ long wanderings at sea to reach Ithaca.
As Jessica Bianchera notes in the critical text, “the metaphor of the voyage in the open sea is classically used in philosophy to understand philosophical speculation itself, the eternal thirst for knowledge, the impulse towards the unknowable, which is symbolic of human existence. […] From the infinitely large to the infinitely small, inside and outside of oneself, the tension towards knowledge, as well as life itself, is configured as an always tumultuous journey with uncertain outcomes, but equally full of charm and learning, so much so that often the destination is lost and thus longer paths and pleasant detours are undertaken. And if on the one hand the desire to arrive (or to return) is strong, on the other it is clear that it would make no sense to do it without having massively collected and learned along the way: after all, the goal is only the reason, the origin, the pretext to undertake the journey ”.
Thus, in the works on display, “the dialectical tension [between reaching the goal and continuing the journey] that is peculiar for the Homeric hero is revealed not only in the individual pieces, which punctually retrace the main passages of his return journey to Ithaca (transformed, among other things, into an iconic line), but also in the general work with extremely concrete materials, typical of La Rosa’s research, such as concrete and metals: if the conceptual interpretation of the work lends itself to an intellectual speculation that opens up on continuous questions and ideas, taking us far away, on the high seas, the materialization of each passage is dressed in all the concreteness and solidity of the goal: it is the mainland”.
Marco La Rosa’s research is mainly nourished by themes and food for thought derived from classical literature and philosophy, tending on the one hand to recover the ancient world through contemporary sensitivity, on the other hand to constantly re-read the lessons of the past to understand its universal values.
With Pèlagos ten years of experimentation on matter come to an end (from the first exhibition in 2011, held by A + B gallery), from concrete to chalk, from lead to copper, from wood to neon, and for the first time they explode in a heterogeneous set of elements that tell not only the journey of Ulysses but also that of the artist, perpetually in search of his own Ithaca.
Marco La Rosa (Brescia, 1978 where he lives and works). In 2011 he graduated in Visual Arts at the Santa Giulia Academy in Brescia, where he has been teaching since 2018 and after graduating in 2005 in Law.
Since 2011 he has exhibited in Italy and abroad, mainly group exhibitions at museums and cultural institutes, including: Centro San Fedele in Milan (winner of the award in 2012), PAV in Turin in 2013, Museo Diocesano Tridentino in Trento in 2014, Museo RISO in Palermo in 2014, Casa Matei Corvin, Cluj-Napoca, Palazzo della Permanente in Milan in 2015, MAC in Lissone in 2016, San Rocco Museum in Trapani in 2017, Palazzo Ducale Mantova and Castello di Lajone in 2018, Venezia Art Factory for Metaxy art collective of IUAV in 2021; among the recent solo shows at the Paolo VI Collection Museum in 2016, Spazio Cordis in Verona in 2019, Palazzo Bertazzoli in Bagnolo Mella in 2020, A + B gallery 2011 and 2016.