MARCELLO SIMEONE By P. Tazzi
Marcello Simeone was born in Naples in 1973.
“Probably if i hadn’t born in Naples ,my life and perceptions would be probably different. The inseparable link between Art and Life and the poetry of an everyday dimension lived in an intense, seductive manner are the most profound characteristics of my city and my works.”
In the late 1980’s and the early 1990’s he was one of the Three Imaginary Boys, a house music group that enlivened the Naples club scene.
In those years the artist says “house music and its rituals deeply influenced my life and my way of experiencing the contemporary condition: clubs, rave parties, after hours gatherings. The basis of all my work has been the desire to represent my experience , from the social to the private. Everything started on one of those long weekends.”
In the meantime he had moved to Florence to study at the Fine Arts Academy,and then to study photography at the Studio Marangoni. He spent long periods in London and New York. In 1999 he began to explore and moved to Milan, and then returned to Naples about one year ago.
He began with photography. Over the years he has added video, drawing, painting and installations.
His work proceeds in fragments, photographs or drawings, videos or compositions of objects that remind us of something beyond them, or life itself, the individual and collective experience of young people, without further cultural or social definition apart from their own – by now global – culture.
Thus the vespa with the Naples license plate is the concise sign of this experience, of trips and passages, races and escapes.. The drawings are a diary of quick notes that aim at being essentials, intense, seductive – glittering with every artificial luminescence – caught between the apotheosis of a contemporary immediate myth and a rude gesture that liberates energy.
Once again, the gap between reality and fiction, expectation and memory is so small that it blurs.
Pierluigi Tazzi, Happiness: Mori Art Museum. Tokyo, 2003.
MARCELLO SIMEONE: YOU ARE SO DELICATE BUT YOU HURT!
by Gigiotto Del Vecchio
Leaving a party at 6AM and facing the daylight is an entirely different show providing some awkward sensations: the light from the sunset is welcoming you with a sweet revenge producing an unpleasant and not-so-delicate experience. This is a light full of gorges where things hide naturally; a melancholic light asking you to look out and do not rest: “the street in front of you, the sea on your right, the sleeping Naples, the flashes and blue reflections, an echo of the dissolving night. Sleepiness, tiredness, physical and moral devastation and a warning in the head: KEEP ON LOOKING.”
The photos and videos and all the works of Neapolitan artist Marcello Simeone are enlighten by the same lucid alteration; it is the view of the one who should be sleeping but is not yet awake and so he contemplates a random point in space where to discover the true beauty of all objects, people and landscapes. This is reality touched by uneasiness, a sense of guilty, nihilistic behaviour or maybe just an act of foolishness. The Photography and video, design and installations are the instruments through which those ideal moments are transformed into art and stigmatised in a firm shape, the finest aesthetic shapes with an absolutely rotten heart threatening to come out at any moment in time.
In “Echoes”, a young pregnant woman is staring at the empty space, smokes, and goes from the bed to the window of a rather naked room, embellished by a vase with some flowers. Then she watches the outside, beyond the glass, but she doesn’t seem to need escaping.
There are trees in a cloudy day and the landscape, is made of grassy courtyards grafted with exasperated slowness by sidewalks and various types of flowers, is a landscape of the soul.
That seems to be born from the small room, from the young woman and her fertile abdomen.
The narrative dimension takes advantage of various codes, the compositions are resulting from an accurate photographic research, where every single image evokes the meaning of the work “you’ re so delicate, but you hurt”. Marcello Simeone loves cinema, but in his intransigence he does not love it all: “I want to understand what is that obsess us as I pretend that a director would tell about its obsessions with courage, whichever they might be, even if that means actors crying for a long time, as it happens in the final scene of “Vive l’Amour” by Tsai Ming Liang.
I am definitively not interested in the cinema resorting to the oneiric parentheses in order to describe harsh feelings; ‘that’ is a cinema that doesn’t have courage or truth”.
Marcello is devoted of the Camera Stilo’, and has the strength and the depth of some of the 20th century writers such as Henry Miller or Celine as far as experiences he had gone through. His personality recalls characters such as Torless that, as an adult, had transformed the excesses, his teenager’s rage, in an rather melancholic elegance, a sort of equilibrium that is born out of uncertainty, a newly formed detachment.
A refinement that is being sharpened from the parthenopean roots, whereas Naples teaches its inhabitants survival at all costs, in a difficult and uncomfortable context. Naples gifts its sons the fascination and the excitement of a truly cosmopolitan dimension, for both historical course and geographical positioning.
The city’s many conflicts, feed creativity and stimulate thought: “Naples is a city that has the structure of a novel. The roads are full of stories asking to be transcribed. Indeed the tale of Naples can just be the one of a baroque and surrealist, unsolved, conflicting novel, whereas the apotheosis of the catholic religion cohabit with its intrinsic blasphemy. It is a city where beguines deal in drugs and preys. Naples is like Barcelona and Tangier. These cities are three sisters and three whores, that is three generous women giving themselves easily and thereafter leaving filth in the streets. There are no laws and traffic lights mean nothing at all .So why do always love it? . Like all whores that are eternal they end up becoming Saints “.
UNTITLED (In the Mood for Love) by ILARIA VENTRIGLIA
The indispensable link between Art and Life and the poetry of the daily life that is spent in an intense and seductive way are the elements that most profoundly characterize Marcello Simeone’s work. Fragments of private life and collective imagery, a sort of map on which our time’s paths are tracked and signs are focused.
Unripe bodies and violet waters, diaphanous flowers and imprisoned stars, the borderline between public and private, reality and fiction, an elegant and sometimes disturbing atmosphere.
He started working with photography, but nowadays he mostly uses video, drawing, painting and installations.
His works are like snapshots, something between the storyboard of a screenplay (his life’s movie) and a diary of memories.
When we got acquainted, he came and picked me up with a white van loaded with works: his destination was Analix Forever, an art gallery in Geneva.
Back from Switzerland, we also loaded a scooter with Naples plate: it was leaning against the gallery walls like a symbol of background, travels, past experiences and changes.
Marcello Simeone is 28 years old, was born in Naples and his works retain the international image of Naples, a town with the soul of a large city.
There is the street image and there is the truth; his work is based on his personal experience, taken from life and memory day after day.
He represents my Naples, the strong, “Dirty PoP”, romantic, contradictory, punk (in its own style), difficult one, far from the clichés that the city often presents.
Dee Jay Techno, among the coolest ones in the Naples club scene of the 90’s, with the Three Imaginary Boys, his band of that period, cooperated and played, among the others, with people like Paul Dailey of the Leftfield, Darren Emerson of the Underworld and Richie Hawtin.
“House Music and its rituals have deeply affected my life and my way of feeling contemporary life; it has been the desire of representing all that characterized my background, the basis of my whole work. It all started in one of those long weekends”.
Presently, he lives in Milan, after spending a long time in Florence, London and above all New York. “After Naples, New York is the city in which I feel most comfortable, I immediately received its charge, that mixture of sadness and seduction emanating from it”.
It that noisy van, we ate, telephoned, talked, listened to P.J. Harvey’s CD, that piece with Thom Yorke, the vocalist of the Radiohead: “Can you hear them, the helicopters, I’m in New York…”, feelings of unfinished things, losses, separations.
The same melancholic, decadent although seductive mood is present in Marcello’s entire work: above, the shiny, aesthetic, glamorous layer, and underneath, the street, with its loneliness and alienation, his whole work is a sad smile to life and beauty: “A Blankness in your smile” was the title of his exhibition.
He talked to me of movies, his great love and inspiration, by Wong Kar Wai and his last movie “In The Mood For Love” and his love for the director’s great attention to details, signs, the unspoken, the seduction of its elegant slowness and the wait, “the track of sexy nostalgia that drags the movie”.
Also his subjects are always lonely people, often livid and immature bodies, perhaps containers of vague evils of the soul, perhaps vulnerable, perhaps only alluring.
There is nothing shameless or excessive in their ambiguity, except for the elegance of being loving and intriguing creatures;
They are waiting for something that maybe will happen, maybe not …, or probably has already happened.
MARCELLO SIMEONE: “METEORITE DUST” By H. Hirsch
The work of the Italian artist Marcello Simeone, born in 1973, calls for a gradual approach and a slow reading. His oeuvre reveals itself like an anthology of poetry in which word by word or image by image new associations are triggered in the mind of the spectator.
The fragile means of expression runs like a red thread through the oeuvre. Drawings, paintings and photographs form a homogeneous universe. The artist takes an installative approach to the various media in order to develop, explore and compile ever new compositions.
The drawings are panels for messages, scribbles, symbols of the close environment. The reduced syntax, accentuated by coloured glitter pens on a white surface, appears like ephemeral cosmic apparitions capturing fragments of thought as in a diary. Simple motifs, such as a bird, the pendant of a necklace, a tree or a notched inscription, looks back to an apparently unsullied world that poses existential questions in the coded form of a rebus.
The exploration of his environment, which Simeone also records in photographs, bears witness to a fervent and intense interest in his generation: brief encounters, young, fragile, androgynous people and poetic images are traced by the lens. He captures magical moments that remain inscribed in our minds like a still life.
The installation in the Kunsthalle Palazzo becomes the projections screen of a sensitive observer. Various different format create mosaic-like sequences, transporting messages of hope, illusion and dreams into the room. Simeone’s artistic syntax puts the spectator into a seductively easy state of mind which remains inscribed in his or her memory through the seriousness of the messages. Everything seems to vibrate transcendentally, drawing traces of light in space.
