Water Tower, 2020
Oil on canvas
50 x 70 cm

Marco Minozzi’s interest in representing the seacoast, foreshore, sea, horizon, sky, mountain and countryside takes on a particularly distinct characteristic in the “Otium” series, where the conventional theme of the landscape becomes updated through subtle or emphatic inflections. The pictorial signs of sand, pebbles, grass, boat, water, waves, fields, factories, mountains and clouds in this suite have been inventively mediated by the tactile reality of the medium of oil that carries imprints of the hand’s movement and modulations of color that implicitly present the surface of the canvas as a virtual palette of pale hues of green, brown and grey.

Within a given painting here, Minozzi delicately articulates minute details of the visible world. Yet details remain continuously counteracted by vagueness and the annulment of illusion, as if to indicate vision’s own limitations to grasp the temporally conditioned world and ever-shifting phenomena of sight. Paradoxically, the pictorial silence of these wontedly rendered paintings emphatically invites the observer’s attention to reexamine the concepts of space, time and perception as investigated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “The natural world is the horizon of all horizons, the style of all possible styles, which guarantees for my experiences a given, not a willed, unity underlying all the disruptions of my personal and historical life. Its counterpart within me is the given, general and pre-personal existence of my sensory functions in which we have discovered the definition of the body.”* This group of works by Minozzi therefore encapsulates the concept of “otium,” the time of leisure spent on the countryside, where idleness, creativity, labor, reflection, research and experimentation may become inextricable.