Oblong Contemporary presents the solo exhibition "Mario Arlati: The Power of Light".
Arlati tells us of the world through colours, giving us a perception of the beauty of life: he accomplishes this creative event by spreading colour by an inventive act of luminosity and considerable definition that seems to give movement to the painting. His works, fields of intense colour on which the pictorial matter is deposited unequally, create iridescent images of light and tones.
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Mario Arlati, uk flag , 2016
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"Mario Arlati’s work guides the eye through a multifaceted inspirational experience wherein he reveals the sensory revelry of not only the colors, but also of the varying surface textures. In this way, his paintings narrate the story behind the surfaces and structures that they grace"
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Mario Arlati was born in Milan in 1947. After some years of erratic studies, his artistic formation matured at the School of Art in Castello Sforzesco, Milan. Starting in the 1980s, a long series of exhibitions began in Italy and abroad, including Ibiza, where he has lived most of the year since the 1970s. Among the personal exhibitions: Milan, Mantua, Munich, ulm (1985-1986); Suzzara, Ibiza, Barcelona (1988); and also Cologne, Rouselore, Miami (1993), Bern, Paris (1994), San Salvador (1995), Basel, Rio de Janiero, Leverkusen, Madrid (2001), Tokyo (2004).
After a first period in figurative style, Arlati soon found a new dimension, which became characteristic of all his work. In Ibiza, in fact he discovers and makes his own the informal material of the Spanish school which, fused with the wild dimension of the island, gives life to works of great consistency in which Laurea literally moves the matter: lacerations, scratches, layers, colours, but also energy, gesture, emotions, poetry. Arlati’s matter is a representation of his intimate soul, made of feelings, emotions, and landscape’s evocations.
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For Arlati, painting is “matter into which other matter is concealed”. The colour is sometimes announced by the titles of the artworks, for instance “Bianco-Rosso-Nero (White-Red-Black)”, but it also always assumes symbolic connotations. The colour black recalls fear and the unknown, the colour white the purity of an idea, the blue the finality of a vision and the red blood and violence.
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"To live near art is a beautiful thing; the farther away you move from it, fewer happy days you will have"
- Mario Arlati
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Mario Arlati, Potenza Del Colore , 2016
Arlati's “Walls” are a representation of the bright, sunny atmosphere of the island of Ibiza, of the symbiosis created between man and nature and the incessant corrosion from sun, wind and sea on the works of man, which gives life to unique, incomparable objects. His considerable sensitivity becomes unique in the excitement of his wish to reveal or let out the secret of what is hidden in the heart of his works: it divides colours into layers, it blends the materials: in other words, the slow flow of time proposes fragments of wider and more extended stories
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Mario Arlati, Hero, 4 , 2016
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Mario Arlati, Flag Incomplete, 2016
Arlati’s most recent artistic production is focused on the subject of flags. The series “Incomplete flags” was developed from a project supported by the European Union and is an open tribute to the artist Jasper Johns. Arlati strongly emphasises the word incomplete, highlighting the viewer’s active role, called by the artist to complete the artwork through their intuition and imagination. In this way, the spectator becomes emancipated, as Jacques Rancière theorised. The use of rags recycled from the dry cleaners and casually painted by the artist’s brush, recalls Arlati’s poetics, which draws much from arte povera while developing a new and fresh artistic gesture.
The flag is immediate and catches the eye faster than thought with the language of symbolism, itself being a symbol - representation, color, emotion. And it is here that Arlati enters onstage to extract the line of vision from the medium and from its message in order to retain its essence as a purely aesthetic experience.
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GROUP OF PAINTINGS
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Mario Arlati, uk 2 Flag , 2016
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Mario Arlati, Luz , 2010
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Mario Arlati, Rojo, Fondazione Stelline, 2012
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Mario Arlati, Grog Nero, 1999
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Mario Arlati, Luz Y Sombra , 2007
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Mario Arlati, Potenza Del Colore , 2016
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TO ENQUIRE ANY OF THE ART WORKS PRESENT IN THE ONLINE EXHIBITION
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MARIO ARLATI
ARTIST'S PAGE
W: +39 3357055914