With AlphaCube the artist literally upends the contemporary art paradigm of the white cube as the best form for conveying its use and comprehension. Lorenzo Marini turns that paradigm on its head and makes the “white cube” the housing, the outside of the artwork. The work is contained completely inside the cube, delineating a new, immersive space animated by artistic brilliance. AlphaCube rises in space like something alien, as much in form as in content: while it is obvious that the artist has a certain fascination for Dadaism and Futurism, which he reinterprets and actualizes, it also cannot be denied that the focus of the installation is not an aesthetic satisfaction but a social and cultural stimulus. The formal result is therefore a fascinating and – we might as well admit it – extremely attractive and seductive installation, which

literally hides “inside it” a criticism of how we communicate and interact today: the too-much-information that sweeps away communication, for which language itself was born. Deep down we are all affected by an acute autism and incapacity for empathy. We talk constantly, we shout more often and in an infinity of new ways: think of the bombardment of images, of ever more vivid colors and, in writing, think of the proliferation of uppercase. All these words and all these messages, although increasingly simpler and simplified, seem not to allow humanity to succeed in expressing itself and communicating. So why so many words? Perhaps to convince ourselves of our false certainties and false myths.

In each of his paintings and sculptures Marini rhapsodizes on the visual, verbal, and (to a lesser extent) sonic properties of the 26 letters, treating their staves and curves as armatures for several levels of fantasy, fantasy which often courses far from its singlesymbol source but never loses sight of it. Marini’s antecedents, clearly conjured in his soi-disant “Type Art,” range from Medieval manuscript illumination to latter-day graffiti (Jean-Michel Basquiat’s quavering ruminations find particular echo in the Italian artist’s giddy phrases); from 1960s Pop art and supergraphics to the notational surrealism of Klee and Miro; from the word-collages of Poesia Visiva (a Franco-Italian visual-poetry movement) to the lit-up geometries of Memphis Milano. The success of Marini’s typocentric artworks depends intellectually on this rich range of citation, but also on a literary use of language— English and Italian for the most part—that befits the works’ graphic effulgence. (On occasion, going on in torrents of

simile about the shapes of letters, Marini the writer approximates the evocative brilliance of his countryman Italo Calvino.)
Surprisingly, calligraphy does not figure, except incidentally, in such Type Art: Marini’s approach, although painterly, is not gestural but is rooted in the form and function of the letters themselves. He regards his B’s and N’s and W’s as stable, established personas, structurally self-contained, inspiring a universe of association around them. In this regard, Marini personalizes the alphabet and, in the evident joy he takes in doing so, encourages us to do the same. One of his single-letter Typevisuals or pan-letter Multitypes is not simply an entertainment for eye and mind but an invitation to elaborate in our own minds upon these no-longer-quotidian phonograms. Such generosity of spirit alone recommends Marini’s Type Art, but his way with color and his irrepressible cleverness, both visual and verbal, also renders his work approachable and appealing.”

Lorenzo Marini’s artistic investigation fuses with the clamor of advertising, giving life to a supreme purity that draws its strength from the innate discretion of art and the provocative invasiveness typical of advertising, a field in which Marini has become an icon and a master. The result of this effective addition is a multitude of singularities that represent the first meaning, the original “void”, fount of creation and life. “Typevisual” is the key exhibition of this experience that realizes a linguistic imaginarium, pausing on the identity of each alphabetic letter and accompanying it with notes that fade into the backdrop of the white canvas, almost as if to invite the observer to search for those rare but pregnant clues of an ancient meaning that defines the history of our oral and written communication.

On each letter Marini builds a new graphic definition that describes that subject, often taken for granted, as if it were an artistic portrait. Here the letters become muses that inspire the master Marini, who tells their “personal” stories while supporting his production with a farreaching basic research that taps into both graphics and painting. Marini’s artistic hybridization, of which “Typevisual” is the result, is not therefore a halfart, but a new art that uses the communicative capacity of advertising, the mystic linearity of graphics and the ancient intimacy of painting, conveying the whole to the observer who, standing before the white dimension, rediscovers the language of the self.

It is because it is elegant, like silence, because it is waiting for ink to fall on a sheet of paper, or waiting for color on a painter’s canvas. Herman Melville in Moby Dick called it ‘a colorless, all-color atheism’. Yet to choose white is strong, radical, and uncompromising.”. In that book, Marini also says that silence was invented by angels with the creation of snow, which covers everything with white and hushes noise. This is echoed in the song Emozioni by Lucio Battisti and Mogol, in which the legendary Italian songwriting duo wonder “why, when sadness falls to the bottom of the heart, like snow it makes no noise”. Soundless, colorless, at first sight Marini’s paintings would appear to be empty, even though we are aware that in this world we do not all look at things in the same way, and indeed one man’s empty is another man’s full. In the Zen culture of the East, empty has a value and white is associated with death, while for us in the West it is the other way round. In different parts of the world, white and black, like empty and full, have opposite meanings.

We in the West are bent on filling up with everything, and on filling the empty. Easterners by contrast seek primarily to empty out, and to empty the full. Empty is a positive attribute, because it is not the nothing of nihilism, but the whole of the potential for creation. The white chosen by Marini conveys this to us and tells us that what torments a painter is to define himself through a color. To give a name to a color, even when this is a “non-color”, is the challenge of painting. Titian did it with red (there is a shade of red called Titian); Veronese did it with green (there is a variation of viridian green called Paolo Veronese green); and it is no coincidence that Titian and Veronese were both from Veneto, as indeed is Lorenzo Marini. Unsurprising, indeed, that here we have two Veneto painters (three, including Marini), because traditionally, Veneto’s is the art that seeks the most to express itself through color (probably because of the influence of Venice) while the forte of the Florentine school is drawing, and the forms of Leonardo and Michelangelo.

“Empty is a positive attribute, because it is not the nothing of nihilism, but the whole of the potential for creation.”

While for Malevich white is a tautology, when we consider Fontana and his cuts, made on canvases of different colors, the cut that comes to our mind is the one on the white canvas; it is a space in the color of the absolute. Thus, white starts to take form and content. And then, since it is the sum of all colors, we can say that it also potentially contains all the world’s meanings. We might even say that there are fifty shades of white. Marini, again in the book cited above, writes about the well-known fear of the blank page, which has to be contaminated first with its exact opposite, black, and then gradually with the other colors. But there is no such thing as white, just as there is no such thing as red, blue, yellow, and all the others; there are reds, blues, yellows, and so on. There are also many whites: milk white, snow white, ice white, zinc white, lily white, anti-flash white,

Navajo white, and many others. It is a color that is only apparently empty, because there are many common expressions that use white or refer to white: a little white lie, to whiten, as white as a ghost, as white as a sheet. And in the tales of Giulio Cesare Croce, when the King asks Bertoldo what is the whitest thing of all, the shrewd peasant wisely answers: “Light.” Indeed, when we break down light by passing it through a prism, what we see is all the colors of the rainbow. Now let us examine how Lorenzo Marini uses his white, or more correctly his whites: tempera, acrylic, putty, salt, chalk, motherof- pearl, paper, and so on. Finding diversity in unity seems to be another of his traits, not only in the various different types of material and of white color that he uses, but also because, like the angels that make the snow fall, he spreads the white on the canvas not, as most

artists do, in order to create the background on which to paint, but as a surface to cover the underground river of meanings. From his white paintings emerge signs, traces of color, schemes, grids and more besides, all of which relate to his art, or arts. It is well known that Marini is also a creative director in advertising, and therefore a creator of images which also emerge discreetly in his paintings. It is not the first time that an artist has come from the world of advertising. Many pop artists have done advertising: Rosenquist and Warhol are the examples that speak for all. But Rosenquist and Warhol adhered very closely to the strictures of advertising, employing techniques, practices and theories gleaned in that profession to exalt their subjects in terms of form and surface.

This is a trait that originated in his studies of architecture and the fine arts, which he studied in Venice with Emilio Vedova, just to keep things informal. What Marini learned in Venice seems to emerge recently in the works Spacevisual 2011, Spacevisual 13, 2013, or Brandvisual 1, 2014, in Los Angeles and New York. As we noted earlier, this shows the direct, or indirect, memory of Piero Manzoni’s Achromes, especially in the wrinkled white canvases. Marini’s paintings are neither abundant nor absolute in color, in that under the surface they contain a structure that is modular and serial in the modernist sense, and is therefore abstract. In this way the paintings end up constituting a form of catalog of possible ideal forms, structures and spaces. They are a search for totality and the absolute that clarifies the obsessive use of white, as in the advertising ads series, in which the surface of the canvas appears divided like a sheet of newspaper, or an advertisement, while being neither one nor the other. A careful reading reveals a four-part structure, whose elements are the placements of the photograph, the illustration, the text, and the logo. It is a semantic grid in which the progressive erasure conducted by the white is the search for truth, because it removes the patent partisan utterances of the figurativeness of advertising, which never tells the truth. It is a manner of structuring the page, of dividing the space, which comes from the fact that Marini started out by drawing and publishing comics, and which perhaps also owes something to the spatial structure of Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, which he saw as a teenager.

“In this way the paintings end up constituting a form of catalog of possible ideal forms, structures and spaces. They are a search for totality and the absolute that clarifies the obsessive use of white”

But here he is searching for a symbolization where nothing is stronger than everything, silence more communicative than noise, and empty fuller than full. So we see that Marini’s pictorial investigation does not only remove us from the cacophony of means of mass communication, but it also makes us think about global events and universal spaces. In his work other series stand out which deal with space, in particular architectural space, not in its plasticity and perspective figurativeness, not as a narrative event, but in the plan view solution that is the abstraction that in the modern age gives life to architecture. Every microarchitecture (house) or macro-architecture (city) is, in plan view, a regular and informal abstraction, which is not inhabiting and living but the idea of inhabiting and of living. Architectural plans are designed to be made a reality at a later time and therefore they have a precise utilitarian purpose, unlike those drawn as buried tracings by Marini who, uncoupling himself from the fact that he is an architect, or indeed because of it, makes paintings in which the plans are an end in themselves; they are drawings of space, they are grids of the painting and, therefore, a catalog of “invisible” and ideal “spaces”. A similar search for the ideal can be seen in the Constellations series, which is Marini’s attempt to give form and image to the universe, to that which is above us, again in space. This is celestial space, which humanity has always felt the need to understand and interpret, long before the modern era enabled us to penetrate it with Galileo’s telescope and everything that came after, delivering a series of low blows to the mythologies that held up the sky. The constellations are also star maps to which Marini seeks to restore symbolism. Indeed, we must not forget that in them

Marini still sees the angels who invented snow, the white silence that covers the world, the white color on his canvases, where we can see points of light, signs, paths, celestial roads of ideal connection. His is not a scientific description. The constellations painted by Marini are not a portrait, nor a copy of star maps made by astronomers (which are themselves abstractions), but the star maps of intuition that, precisely because of their lack of scientific precision, enable us to locate our free imagination in them. They are in fact “figures that you need to know how to read, this is why I never design the work. I paint as I go, and when I go wrong I like it to be seen.” Earlier we said that, in all this abstraction, Marini also deals with the central events of our global existence, naturally without describing them. This brings us to the work interpreting the events in Tienanmen Square in 1989, the same year the Wall came down in Berlin. A blood-red painting, here too covered by the white that acts to focalize, the white that covers and uncovers, because here and there it lets through red stains that become pink, creating an image that brings to mind old Chinese paintings of landscapes. Marini absorbs the pictorial tradition of the Far East, where there is no tradition of figuration, but in which man, when he is featured, is small and embedded in the greatness of the landscape. In the end, we see that the works of Lorenzo Marini are new terrestrial and celestial landscapes. And so, since we began in the West, we can only finish in the East, where the Zen proverb tells us that: “The eye that sees everything cannot see itself.” Marini’s paintings, which never show everything, are works that launch us on a search for ourselves.

It is there, said Gombrich, that every form evokes a thousand memories and secondary images, like a river that opens out into a delta of infinite possibilities, in which even the smallest rivulets can give rise to new configurations and to original developments. As soon as an image is assigned to the art, a new nexus of connections is created which the image cannot escape. Lorenzo Marini’s images are also built in transitions, outside the orthodoxy of the everyday and inside a conduit branching towards successive stylistic reprises, and they are also made of rescued linguistic relics like Futurism, action painting or the stylistic fragmentation of postmodernism, all cues that now, thanks to Marini, come back into play in new arrangements of interference and of meaning. This is why the artworks of Marini, who works horizontally, contaminating painting, silkscreen printing, environmental installation and photography, are a coagulation of many flows and form the point of emergence of the great many cues that guide his creative universe, which encompasses and draws on cultural production

from top to bottom, taking in graphic art, industrial design, the languages of advertising and cartoons, to arrive at the lofty domain of Renaissance artworks, right up to the experiments of the historic avant-garde. The creative fusion Marini builds up on images repositions them on a plane of perspective where preferential motifs or linguistic boundaries no longer exist. In Marini’s works, for example in “Type C” (2017), representation, uniqueness or duplication of figures, abstraction, opulence of color, and essentiality of the stroke all cohabit on the same plane. What emerges is a melding of images that, transformed and metamorphosed, are nevertheless inimitable, because the moving relationship that Marini regales us, with his founts, his expressive means and his imaginarium, is also inimitable and never standardized. Straightaway it must be pointed out that Lorenzo Marini’s works, even in their apparent playfulness, are not consumed immediately, and instead require the viewer to spend time in analysis and decipherment.

“What emerges is a melding of images that, transformed and metamorphosed, are nevertheless inimitable”

Although their impact is immediate, a promise kept by the vividness of color and gesture, by the tongue-incheek use of recognizable images and by the paradoxical interferences drawn from the highs and lows of cultural production, at the same time each work by the artist requires more time, as if to launch a challenge at the viewer to penetrate the work beyond the pleasantness of the shades and tones and recover a hidden meaning, the decipherment of an enigma, the revelation of a new code. The challenge also lies in the creation of a new visual context that frees language, revealing perceptive and psychic experiences fulfilled as signed, verbal or graphic experiences: an “E” made up of architectural blueprints becomes a futuristic project of architecture and semiotics, an “O” fluctuates in space held suspended by bands of color that recall Delaunay, Goncharova and Russian Rayonism, a “C” splits into two in its symmetrical alter ego, as if to become the symbol of an unknown brand or of a new Marvel superhero.
On examining the elaboration that Marini applies to the

atomic units of words, i.e. letters, the viewer’s mind turns to Isidore Isou and to Lettrism, the movement that Isou founded in France in 1946 together with Maurice Lemaître, Gabriel Pomerand, Roland Sabatier, Francois Dufrene and Gil Wolman. Although lacking the eschatological and political charge of historical Lettrism, here too, letters and signs in Marini’s hands become the plastic elements on which to build a new pictorial vision that becomes poly-writing, that therefore extends to the literary world and to iconography, where it is no longer words but letters and signs that are elevated to the status of autonomous elements, access keys to the world and to the potential of an uncorrupted, primal vision of signs. The childish drawings that permeate these works testify to a reformative dream, a simple and immediate imaginarium, and a new and extremely playful outlook, which melds with the complex and profound experience of an artist who has always spanned the symbology of signs and has detailed knowledge of its nuances and its expressive potential.

He works in an area with boundaries that overlap and are often mutable, just as some of his compositions are stratified and polysemic and must be read as contemporary collages in which the superimposition of silkscreen printing and painting and the richness of iconographic references just barely allow the underlying drawings to emerge, while the surface drawings jump out at the viewer. Marini’s vision is soft, playful and even sensual, in which Eros, obvious in a work like “ArtAlfa” (2019), lies in having grasped that history today is not one and absolute, it does not have the closed boundaries of exclusive membership, it does not have to take refuge in unique Native American reservations and it does not know the truth except as a moving horizon to aim for and on which to converge dreams, fantasies, passions and impressions. But what the artist has set in motion is not an improvised game, despite the playful aspect of some of his works.

“These works are like messages sealed in a bottle and thrown into the sea of visual chaos that we are immersed in today; they are the testimony of an absolute master of contemporary communication who is now concentrating on pure, disinterested creativity”

“It is hard to think of
a more vital art form at this point in history.”

Under this freed freedom of languages, visual and verbal, Marini presides over a different organization of the space of the artwork for the image, and of reference contexts for words. He has cleared the field of a series of incursions that, with the supremacy of gesture and of the body of the artist, invade the territory of a culture saturated with printed images, glyphs and graphemes, as he showed in the installation AlphaCube, recently exhibited at the Venice Biennale 2019 and at the Design Week in Dubai, in which Marini is photographed in the pose of the Vitruvian Man, no longer outstretched on a world where man is the measure of all things, but on an elastic universe, in the liquid expansion/ contraction that today expresses the relationship between verbal signs, graphics and images.

Finally the letters and the alphabets breathe, and advance through new and fertile territories of imagination and creative freedom. The works of Lorenzo Marini have given impetus to this emancipation and to a vision of language that is no longer restrictive but connective and prolific, where his passion for art also becomes the precious indication of a way of observing the world from multiple angles, seizing on its past experiences and possible future developments. The absolute of art and of the freedom of man lies here, in an inescapable form of exchange and dialog, because the only intolerance that art abides is intolerance of arrest, stiffening and separation. It is hard to think of a more vital art form at this point in history.