“Landscapes are portrayals of vision that occurs within the body. The painting portrays what the eye and mind grasp, what the body grasps over the passage of time. The landscape is a portrait of vision.” —Marco Minozzi

“Although the landscape genre is without question a significantly different type of representation than the portrait, they are both conceived through vision that is conditioned by our corporeal reality. As Merleau-Ponty notes, the world is perceived through our sensory functions that are defined by the body.

Hence to consider landscape and portraiture as mutually exclusive genres is no longer epistemologically sufficient, especially after modernism’s introduction of abstraction as a means of addressing the complexity of visual perception. In my continuous project titled Emersioni that began in 2004, I attempt to leave the lexical and semantic categorizations of imagery behind in order to explore the matrix of the human experience.

For me painting is an ongoing experimentation that cannot be trapped within a single category of theme or style.

Landscape as Portraiture, Portraiture as Landscape was a tentative title for this project at a given point.” —Marco Minozzi

“While Arte Povera—the term coined by the late Germano Celant in 1967 to characterize the unconventional Italian postwar current in art—has played an important role in my practice, my paintings touch upon certain elements of that movement rather than its overall radicality of materials. My work attempts to touch upon perception of the visible and invisible world through instances of cultural memory, signs, indices, numbers and words, but also the puzzles of myths and legends. My paintings are related to various pictorial instances of Rembrandt and Anselm Kiefer, so as to give way to a discourse that is personal and collective at once.” —Marco Minozzi

“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.” —Maurice Merleau-Ponty