Axel Vervoordt Gallery Hong Kong is pleased to present an exhibition by Italian artist Marco Tirelli, featuring medium and small size paintings specifically created for the show.

Tirelli’s artistic philosophy consists in geometrical figures, rectangular and square structures delicately suspended in a tension between light and darkness. His enigmatic forms reflect a number of Tirelli’s enduring preoccupations with time, space and what lies beyond.

With their different architectural features and arresting contrasts of lights and shadows - nuances of modern- sfumato - the works evoke a fluctuation between appearance and disappearance which epitomize the artist’s vision - a search for the mystery of the visible and its concomitant inner reflection – and his aspiration to elicit active sensorial and mental participation from the viewer, – “I’m fascinated by surfaces and what is on the other side of them.“ says the artist.

Tirelli’s dramatic technique is at the core of the spatial incongruities of vision and deviation of perspective that create the alienating space. Using low-pressure paint sprays and thin marten brushes, the chromatic buzzing of his dots provokes a continuous blurring and an apparent monochromatic effect. This remarkable application of pointillism, conceives a strong sensation of the flow of time, a passageway to meditation, a bridge between the possible and the impossible. Tirelli noted:

The pointillist saw reality as something that was not objective, as if to say that we perceive the light of reality, but things in themselves remain far away from us, deaf and dumb; all we perceive is the reflection of light on their surfaces.

The artist’s ambition to show what cannot be seen draws inspiration in a free and modern way from some of the fundamental characteristics of the Metaphysical Art of Giorgio De Chirico and Giorgio Morandi. His geometry has a lot in common with the three-dimensional forms that crowd the disappearing perspectives of De Chirico’s silent cities as well as Morandi’s still life of 1918 and 1919, where the geometrical elements entertain a contradictory interplay between illusion and reality.

The artist talk Marco Tirelli: Exploring the sfumato takes place on May 16th, 2018.

A body of large-scale canvases - some of which were exposed in Dipingere il possibile in Todi, Italy in 2017- is hosted in Axel Vervoordt Antwerp (9th June - 25th August 2018). Tirelli has exhibited extensively in Europe and Japan and was selected to take part in the Italian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.

Marco Tirelli

Pictures of the exhibition