Theatrical settings, cinematographic screens, graffiti marks, text, baseball players, birds, the human body, furniture, pure abstraction: such are the diverse images that circulate within Marco Minozzi’s intriguing array of paintings titled “Absorption.” Executed between 2004 and 2021, these paintings manifest ghostly, magical and mysterious associations to living forms and spaces, where pictorial entities are presented in a manner that evokes dreams and the unconscious. Having formulated his own idiom of the continuing surrealist current, each one of these paintings by Minozzi presents the viewer with a plethora of interpretative possibilities, while simultaneously it operates as a tabula rasa for erasing the mind’s relation to the world in order to think and rethink the concept of the self. “The example of history will also dissipate like a mirage ... for the fundamental historicity of the event that we retain suffices to conceive the possibility of a subjective reproduction of the past in the present,” claims Jacques Lacan.* Matrix, Pregnant, Rewind/Infinity, Thomas Aquinas and Storage by Minozzi register as historical mirages, inviting the spectator to subjectively devise imaginative meanings that nonetheless remain, like mind and body to a great extent, non-stationary and ever-shifting within the frameworks of the individual and the social.

*Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” report to the Rome Congress held at the Istituto di Psicologia della Università di Roma, September 26 and 27, 1953. In Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 75.