Laboratorio Schifano

MACRO, Roma
26 October 2010 - 6 February 2011
http://en.macro.roma.museum/mostre_ed_eventi/mostre/laboratorio_schifano

By Nicole Minatel
Few exhibitions are as appropriately named as the Laboratorio Schifano show currently on display at the MACRO in Rome. Composed by a motley assortment of pictures, postcards, drawings, polaroids, notes and even a video by the late Mario Schifano, the ‘laboratory’ set up in one of the museum’s exhibition rooms is best described as a voyage throughout the creative process of the extremely prolific Roman artist.
Curated by Massimo Barbero and Francesca Pola, the exhibition (which will run at the MACRO until February 6th, 2011) presents over two thousand works that now belong to the Archivio Mario Schifano, owned by the artist’s widow and son. Set up just as interestingly as the pictures on display themselves, the viewer who chooses to venture into the display space is confronted with a labyrinth of artistic outpour, composed of large glass plates that are covered in art from floor to ceiling. Pola describes this choice of presentation as a tribute to and continuation of Schifano’s creative flow, which was uninterrupted, quick and impatient. The maze culminates into two medium sized television sets that are placed on the floor and play video ‘collages’ by Schifano on a continuous loop, thus reinstating the artist’s practical, repetitive and high-speed approach to art making itself.
Contextualized within his own life, Schifano’s desire for velocity and change is not uncanny, but rather completely fitting. Born in Libya 1934, Schifano moved to Rome as a child and remained entangled in the social and artistic processes of the city until his death in 1998. Involved with art, filmmaking, rock music and drugs, he lived a life of excess that translates into the artistic output that began with paintings first exhibited in 1959. Working from Rome but exhibiting in galleries such as the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, Schifano and fellow Italians Tano Festa and Mimmo Rotella were placed among the ranks of Rauschenberg, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Dine and Segal (Scobie). However, they stayed at a distance from the American Pop Art movement, ‘creating’ instead a European counterpart now known as the ‘Scuola Romana’. Frequently working in series, Schifano went on to develop a pattern of art making that, as described by Pola, involved creating, retouching and reworking every picture to a quasi-obsessive extent.
This exquisite mode of creation is blatantly evident in Laboratorio Schifano, where images that seem to have nothing in common make sense together simply because of their far more legitimate relationship with Schifano’s desires at the specific time and place in which he decided to put the ideas on paper. There is no common theme or imagery in the works – instead, they are an amalgamation of the ever-changing thoughts and ideas that go on in our minds. In this sense, the show is mentally and visually engaging, whole but also unfinished and most importantly, extremely unique. No other person on the planet could have created Schifano’s ‘laboratory’, not for the level of artistic skill but rather because it is so personal to this particular man’s innermost spirit, which the spectator is given permission to voyeuristically explore while walking through the glass corridors.
Thus, it is easy for an inflexible viewer to dismiss this collection of thoughts and tag it as excessive and overflowing with unimportant information. But it is also impossible for this same viewer to deny that it is this plethora of banal information presented by the artist that makes one feel as if one knew Schifano in person and has been given access to his private assortment of self-referential yet universally comprehensible ideas. And even if these ideas are not in synchrony with one’s own, they are still a beautiful, engaging and thought-provoking way to look at a world that manages to be colorful and black and white, optimistic and pessimistic, stunning and ugly, and sane and insane all at the same time.

Scobie, Ilka. "A La Schifano." Artnet Magazine. Web. 21 Nov. 2010. .