A PORTFOLIO MARCO CONTINO
MARCO CONTINO
£ 16,000 per sq.m How to make £ 16,000 per sq.m. Untitled (Sugar Wall) Ammainabandiera Sale Freud Machine (Automatic Typing) Gratwandern Contact / Credits
INDEX
Biography / Statement
/ MARCO CONTINO
BIOGRAPHY
MARCO CONTINO
Marco Contino, born in Catania, Sicily, in 1986, graduates at the Accademy of Fine Arts of Venice in 2014. During his studies he participates in various events in occasion of the 54° Biennale d'Arte di Venezia, collaborating for instance with the Argentinean artist Amalia Pica. In 2009 his work is awarded at the international stage design contest Opera J mise en scène. Between 2010 and 2012 he takes part in a series of workshops hold by the François Pinault Foundation at its Venice gallery of Palazzo Grassi where he has the chance to collaborate with artists such as Urs Fischer, Loris Gréaud, Friedrich Kunath and Piotr Uklanski. In 2012, Marco Contino wins a scholarship for Middlesex University in London where he studies at the MA programme of Fine Arts for a year. In London he displays works in Eye-Eye Artist's Collective at the Art Pavilion and in Hot-One-Hundred at Schwartz Gallery. During Spill Festival 2013 he collaborates with the artists Julie Vulcan and The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein. In December 2014 he is selected by Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation to expose in 98ma Collettiva Giovani Artisti (98th Young Artists' Collective) at the foundation's gallery of St. Mark's Square, Venice.
STATEMENT
MARCO CONTINO
In his artistic approach, Marco Contino is strictly contemporary. His work often shows minimalist characteristics which are subject to conceptual processes of deformation or destruction determining both the formal aspect and the meaning of the piece. These processes that generate or mutilate the works manifest themselves in the form of live performance or photographic or videographic documentation accompanying the physical artwork. The ironic play with the concept of value — natural and artificial, real and fictive, objective and subjective — as well as the appropriation of the rules that define the determining dynamics and the experimental violation of this game's structure can be identified as the recurrent artistic language throughout many of Marco Contino's works.
MARCO CONTINO
What is the value of space? The urban sprawl and population growth lead to people living in continuously shrinking habitations while the ever-growing market demand keeps doubling the rental and land prices. Prestigious residential areas form around the city centres; less eligible and sought-after boroughs develop in the more remote districts. Accordingly, the market value of the neighbourhoods is defined. It is a dynamic that derives from a desire deeply anchored in the heart of an entire society. We want to be social, connected, in the centre not of something but of everything that happens around us. But is that what we need, too? In a world that is entirely and complexly connected, ironically, we tend to feel lonely in the crowd. The life that the big city offers us can hardly take this loneliness off our shoulders. Is is maybe, after all, just a question of social prestige. ÂŁ16,000 per sq.m. is a genuine piece of London soil, extracted in Hampstead Heath. The work refers to the value of the ground, of the space, of the means one has or has not to inhabit it for the price of the luxury it symbolises. It recounts the privilege of choosing where to live, where to exist, where to be at home. It quotes the insanity of the real estate market and the abstractism of the concrete values enabling it.
ÂŁ 16,000 PER SQ.M.
2013 London soil, Hampstead Heath 100 x 100 x 15 cm
£ 16,000 PER SQ.M.
MARCO CONTINO
£ 16,000 PER SQ.M.
MARCO CONTINO
£ 16,000 PER SQ.M.
MARCO CONTINO
£ 16,000 PER SQ.M.
MARCO CONTINO
£ 16,000 PER SQ.M.
MARCO CONTINO
HOW TO MAKE £ 16,000 PER SQ.M.
MARCO CONTINO
2013 video 5:39 min.
HOW TO MAKE £ 16,000 PER SQ.M.
MARCO CONTINO
HOW TO MAKE £ 16,000 PER SQ.M.
MARCO CONTINO
HOW TO MAKE £ 16,000 PER SQ.M.
MARCO CONTINO
HOW TO MAKE £ 16,000 PER SQ.M.
MARCO CONTINO
HOW TO MAKE £ 16,000 PER SQ.M.
MARCO CONTINO
MARCO CONTINO
A wall is a physical presence created to divide, to separate one part from the other. It is not a natural phenomenon but artificial, constructed by men and therefore also destructible by men. To lick, using one’s tongue to decompose, is a highly intimate action. Demolishing a wall by licking it means choosing a very delicate method of precision for an operation that is raw, dirty and of such great scale that the relation cannot be seen but as out of proportion. It is a choice that requires an immense amount of effort and dedication. Two entities are licking two opposed parts of the same wall not perceiving each other, unconscious of each other’s actions. The wall prevents the possibility of a gaze, of any kind of contact. Sugar, caramel, a simple, elementary material and yet complicated in its production, sweet and tasty — a delight in small doses but nauseating and unsanitary if consumed in great quantities. What coalesces on the floor is a blend of sugar and saliva; in its confluence the only contact established between the two sides of the wall before the wall itself collapses.
UNTITLED (SUGAR WALL)
2013 performance caramel bricks
UNTITLED (SUGAR WALL)
MARCO CONTINO
UNTITLED (SUGAR WALL)
MARCO CONTINO
UNTITLED (SUGAR WALL)
MARCO CONTINO
UNTITLED (SUGAR WALL)
MARCO CONTINO
UNTITLED (SUGAR WALL)
MARCO CONTINO
UNTITLED (SUGAR WALL)
MARCO CONTINO
UNTITLED (SUGAR WALL)
MARCO CONTINO
UNTITLED (SUGAR WALL)
MARCO CONTINO
UNTITLED (SUGAR WALL)
MARCO CONTINO
"Come diventare uno stato indipendente in tre semplici passi." ("How to become an independent nation in three simple steps.")
AMMAINABANDIERA
MARCO CONTINO
2014 in collaboration with Martin VerdroĂ&#x; offset-printed paper, anilinic colour variable dimensions
AMMAINABANDIERA
MARCO CONTINO
AMMAINABANDIERA
MARCO CONTINO
AMMAINABANDIERA
MARCO CONTINO
2014 corroded Venetian bricks, epoxy resin variable dimensions
MARCO CONTINO
The death of Venice is an old story, closely linked to the end of the Republic and the inevitable corrosion of its social structure and urban fabric. Once built to be a commercial machine, Venice reawakens in a world that has outgrown the kind of market it has been designed for and, ironically, transmutes itself into the product to be sold on the new market of the Twentieth Century in a self-destructive spree. Tudy Sammartini, who has long been engaging with the problems Venice is subjected to, declares in a recent interview that “Venice has always been a commercial town, but today, this Byzantinism predominates above everything else. The mercantile spirit reigns supremely. They’d sell their own mother if only they could.” It is impossible not to resign in watching Venice putting itself on sale — piece after piece, brick after brick — as a macro-object of consumption. Sale features objects made from the powders of the Venetian bricks that, in the saline air of the lagoon, crumble into sand. Each sculpture is a sad, mass-produced souvenir coming in unlimited quantities, multiplied by the use of industrial moulds and fabricated with ordinary resin that re-assembles the ashes of the Serenissima into an object paying homage to the new persona of Venice.
SALE
“The rate at which Venice is going is about that of a lump of sugar in hot tea.” John Ruskin
SALE MARCO CONTINO
SALE MARCO CONTINO
SALE MARCO CONTINO
SALE MARCO CONTINO
SALE MARCO CONTINO
SALE MARCO CONTINO
SALE MARCO CONTINO
SALE MARCO CONTINO
SALE MARCO CONTINO
According to The Telegraph¹, the number of people worldwide owning and using a smartphone will surpass 2 billion in 2016. The United Nations estimate world population 7.4 billion² for that same year.
¹ “Quarter of the world will be using smartphones in 2016”; Sophie Curtis on The Telegraph UK Online, 11 Dec 2014 ² World Population Prospects, United Nations Secretariat
FREUD MACHINE (AUTOMATIC TYPING)
MARCO CONTINO
2014 in collaboration with Martin Verdroß high resolution scans ratio 4:3
FREUD MACHINE (AUTOMATIC TYPING)
MARCO CONTINO
FREUD MACHINE (AUTOMATIC TYPING)
MARCO CONTINO
American anthropologist Amber Case defines the smartphone as a body appendage. If we take a closer look at the role this device plays in our lives, we will find that, more than an appendage of the body, it is an appendage of the mind, and we will find that the relationship we share with it is not so much of parasitic nature in our favor as it is a form of symbiosis: it is a giving and taking of information, it is trading data with data. We feed our everyday biographies into the device that is eager to learn because it was designed that way. It is born as a blank sheet of paper, and it becomes, more with every piece of information we provide, a mould of ourselves, the container of a distorted portrait, a smudged finger print. This matrix of information lies hidden in the depths of the device’s memory as a sediment. If the system is stimulated, it would reproduce it following the algorithms it was programmed to execute. If now we cease our part of the process, letting the software compose text in complete autonomy, the smartphone produces an output singlehandedly which is a blend of the preinstalled thesaurus, vocabulary the user has added and affirmed and a dynamic system of syntactic rules used by the device as a grid to arrange the content. The product is, of course, casual and free of contextual meaning or relevance; it is only in the eye of the reader that the generated text assumes a strange kind of poetry, where it is attributed a significance that cannot have been intended by the machine in its recount, where structures of the life it unavoidably quotes are being identified and interpreted. It so becomes a perverse biography written by a machine – both highly subjective and strikingly objective at the same time – that, digging deep into our virtual subconscious, mercilessly throws the facts of our own lives into our faces, wrapped into a code that has no key. Almost as if it was an ancient legend, the plot is fiction, containing but a spark of truth.
FREUD MACHINE (AUTOMATIC TYPING)
MARCO CONTINO
MARCO CONTINO
In cartography, a dashed line is the conventional way of marking a border. It is an artificial subsidiary line that does not exist within the real world. By covering regular sections of a trail surrounded by natural landscape with industrially produced lawn, this artificial line is translated from its abstract form on the map to a concrete presence in physical space. While visually perceiving the intervention as a dashed line when descrying it from a remote and elevated viewpoint, once the hiker approaches, he shrinks to become part of the cartographic microcosm himself. The dashed line turns into a disappearing and reappearing dynamic of the path, which lies fragmented as double-sided cul-de-sacs before him. The haptic interplay of the changing ground beneath his feet underlines the dialectic of this losing and finding the trail – a rhythmic interference with the meditative act of rambling, riling the philosopher’s train of thought, pausing the poet’s haiku, disturbing the pilgrim’s prayer. Pra de Pütia (South Tyrol, Northern Italy) is part of UNESCO Dolomites Foundation.
GRATWANDERN
2015 in collaboration with Martin Verdroß land art installation; industrial rolled turf on trail trail section of 400 m
GRATWANDERN
MARCO CONTINO photo credit: Gustav Willeit
GRATWANDERN MARCO CONTINO
GRATWANDERN MARCO CONTINO
MARCO CONTINO
CONTACT / CREDITS
marco.contino@virgilio.it 0039 346 21 50 174
cover portrait by Martin VerdroÃ&#x;
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