With his series of oils on canvas for Moving Stillness, Vittorio Marella closely investigates the manifestations of Venetian daily life, depicted in a new and surprising manner. His language contains the archetypes of a Venice in which time takes on inscrutable dimensions, far removed from the prosaic nature of the contemporary city.
Fleeting intuitions and almost iconic details, rendered with a skillful alternation of light and darkness, seem to belong to a very individual imagery, which only the inhabitants of the lagoon can perhaps fully understand.
Marella's paintings are photograms of a world suspended between reality and dream, far from any romantic or holographic representation of Venice. His highly personal gaze investigates the deepest folds of the wonder of those who live in the city every day, a people born and raised in the most surreal of urban agglomerations that man has ever conceived. Marella talks about life, death, destiny, loneliness, impossible human relationships, in a sometimes ghostly scene in which man is saved only by clinging to the truth of a detail, a memory that is familiar and dear to him.
The mastery with which this very young artist depicts the surface of the bulwark of a vaporetto or the curve of a hemp mooring line betray the lacerating need for contact with a real, material reference point that frees him from nihilistic doubt, from the horror of the abyss that constantly seeks to invade his canvases. In this conflict between life and death, between light and shadow, Marella's extraordinary ability to embody the myth of Venice and what it represents in the global imagination is manifested.
