Skarstedt Paris is pleased to announce Landscaping, Marco Pariani’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and the artist’s debut in Paris. On view from 13 September – 12 October 2023, it will feature a selection of new paintings.
The works presented in Landscaping challenge and expand upon the traditional notions of the landscape genre. Each painting shares the same luminous mint green background, an enticing and lush color built up through Pariani’s multi-layered application process, in which multiple coats of colored gesso are applied to the canvas and then sanded down before adding elements of oil, acrylic, and spray paint. On top of each ground rest images of abstracted amusement park rides pulled from the artist’s Instagram feed and Google images. Pariani is particularly drawn to anthropomorphized rollercoasters and carousels, their fronts adorned with cartoonish faces of ducks or insects, as seen in Inventing a Landscape and Provence Violet Reddish Landscape (all works 2023), in which red globs of paint evoke beak-like forms, or Theme Park Abstraction, where a square brown face is embellished with a top hat, and his alternating brightly colored body suggests a caterpillar crawling by. Pariani is interested in taking these pulled images and abstracting them almost to the point of collapse.
In certain ways, Landscaping is both a fluid extension of Pariani’s past show, Inflatables, at Skarstedt London, and a return to motifs from his earlier work. Pariani does not distinguish between the urban and the rural terrain, as the two share many similarities, and their boundaries are often fluid. Previously, he was drawn to images of Christmas inflatables, the blow-up home decorations that adorn front lawns of American suburbia and imbue their environments with manufactured holiday cheer—iconography which Pariani viewed as landscapes in and of themselves. Further expanding on this motif of the atypical “landscape,” the artist arrived at his present subject matter of deteriorating anthropomorphized carnival rides.
Pariani’s works persistently question what defines a landscape in contemporary society and examines the ways we alter them. Indeed, the background color in these paintings inspired by the artist’s New York City surroundings, in particular, the shade of green used on an industrial garage door. While its place in the green family evokes the natural, verdant world, Pariani’s candy-colored minty hue is undoubtedly synthetic. This choice of both color palette and subject matter, and the latent artificiality within each, call forth the myriad ways in which humans alter and control their surroundings to suit their needs. Indeed, in present-day urban environments, our surroundings are so often manmade that we no longer register them as being landscapes.
Underneath the dilapidated amusements, Pariani paints rows of apples, cherries, flowers, and mushrooms, which seem to dance across the canvas in neat rows. These friezes along the bottom register of many of his paintings are inspired by the brightly colored works Henri Matisse painted after visiting Tahiti and French Polynesia, which lend a sense of humor and levity paramount to the artist’s practice while furthering the dichotomy of natural versus artificial. In other instances throughout Landscaping, decorative motifs are applied with patterned paint rollers, in the vein of Christopher Wool, to once again question the distinction between the organic and the manufactured. Further pulling from art historical precedent, the central compositional structure of Pariani’s works throughout the exhibition reference Giorgio Morandi’s natures mortes. In this way, Pariani’s lighthearted musings realign the art historical genre of the landscape to imagine our contemporary backdrop in a new light.
To request the french version of this press release, please email paris@skarstedt.com.
