U R B A N S U B U R B I A

Marco Minozzi had previously titled this group of paintings depicting segments of suburbia “Counter-urbanization.” Such paintings as The City Bridge (Ostiense Station), Rome and The Canal question the concept of typology. Both urban and suburban, neither urban nor suburban, peripheral, in-between, composite, transitional, inconclusive: such are the unstable semantic implications of the afore-mentioned two paintings, as they render linguistic taxonomy somewhat insufficient. While addressing taxonomic issues of the landscape genre, Minozzi unapologetically practices perspectival representation of architecture and the space it inhabits. A number of paintings from this series elicit dialogues between the suburban and rural as well.

As suggested by its title, Piero della Francesca (L.A. The Artificial River) recalls innumerable paintings of the Renaissance, including for instance Perugino’s Consignment of the Keys to Saint Peter in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, although rendered on a relatively minuscule scale here. These works of Minozzi may also momentarily bring to mind the paintings of Richard Estes, a forerunner of the photorealist style. Yet Minozzi neither utilizes a specific system of geometric perspective nor does he trace the projected photograph. Rather, his rendition of imagery is primarily intuitive and mainly content-driven, even though he stains the canvas with oil in a manner that water and nature have stained the concrete of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. “Stains are the most abstract forms, although they’re not abstract at all,” says Minozzi.