POSSIBLE WORLDS

Marco Crivello’s work is elemental, arresting, muscular, incorporating a layering and overlapping of elements and a porous geology of paint. What fascinates is the technical ingenuity which enables him to be both establishing paint as elemental and at the same time introducing a composition which comments on landscape – the work exists both as product of and in connection with our material world of land, sea and weather. In a sense, his new works are like jewels – intrinsically beautiful, polished objects separated from the land and materials that produced them; decorative, abstract surfaces. But the eye is drawn above, beneath and across those surfaces, dispersing attention to rhythms that promise to come to rest only beyond the frame. On first viewing landscapes that establish tension, cacophony and control, on second glance they are radiant as jewels and drenched with beauty, the result of accretion, spumato and sedimentation and sometimes irradiated with gold. The evidence of process remains in the work and is part of its living rawness. The play of substance on substance, the corrosion and layering of materials are played out throughout Crivello’s processes of composition and are still evident in the finished works, so that built into the eventual stylistic polish is a rhythmically dynamic rawness, creating new potential for extension and endless, unforeseeable possibility.

Possible Worlds catalogue extract by Sue Roe critic and author of Gwen John: A Life, and The Private life of the Impressionists
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