U R B A N L A N D S C A P E

The congested urban landscape has been a crucial and paradoxical subject for Marco Minozzi over the past decade, as it simultaneously mirrors the artist’s direct observation of spaces he inhabits and spaces he imagines, tapping into their benefits and faults. These paintings also remain connected to a broad range of art-historical instances of the pictorial representation of the city through diverse styles and contents, recalling such works as Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco Effects of Good Government in the City and the Country (1338-39) in the Sala della Pace in Palazzo Pubblico in Siena and Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s oil-on-wood painting titled The Tower of Babel (circa 1563) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Such historical landscapes and those by Minozzi address, through their own contexts, forms of civic order and “human-induced degradation” that alarmingly threatens the natural world, its species and mankind’s habitat, to borrow the phrase from the architectural theorist and urbanist Rem Koolhaas.*

While Minozzi explosively charges many of his cityscapes through such titles as Cathedral (Manhattan) I and The Silent Tower, urging a critique of hegemonic cultures, other paintings manifest highly imaginary, if not offbeat, representations of temporally undefinable urban settings. Bearing titles that refer to Antonio Manetti and Sandro Botticelli, these paintings of Minozzi perceptively address the very status of painterly representation of the urban landscape as a theoretical polemic within our time, an age inundated by accelerating rates of inception and dissemination of imagery through mechanical and digital means.