Mario Schifano
Acerbo

In the 1980s, Schifano developed a massive number of pictorial and thematic cycles that would go down in history: noteworthy are the series of "Acerbo", the "Campi di Pane", the "Paesaggi Anemici", as well as the "Trees of Life". These are just some of the series, which add to those on childhood, where the artist used to stick small plastic animals onto the canvas. Not to forget the cycles of the "Palms" and the "Anomalous Wave". All this to say how explosive this crazy, small, great artist with a ridiculous name was.

I could make a reckless list of cycles and pictorial ideas that the artist dealt with, but for this review, I would like to focus on the cycle of the "Acerbo".

These are incredibly energetic works, Schifano's famous still lifes, very personal and heirs of the floral concepts of previous years. The chromatic interpretation is compelling: it always moves from very intense and deep tones to the lighter and clearer ones, in a shapeless blend made of visible brushstrokes, from which the immediacy and energy of the artist always shines through.

The absolute strength is the material sense that the work has, given by the chemistry of acrylic colors, which dried quickly creating thickness and big drops. The shapes are to be touched, and it is a pleasure to do so; it's like filling your nostrils with a fragrance, only you can do it with your hands.

The artist used the tube directly on the canvas to build the shapes with the necessary thickness.

The frame does not exist, indeed, it exists but is produced by the artist in an imaginative way, distorted, to create a boundary, a pre-frame, that inevitably will be crossed by the famous emotional drippings. The white frame, ephemeral, as a boundary that breaks, but does not sufficiently confine the explosive emotion of the artist.

The colors of the fruits are always dense, surreal, chemical, and tell our time, in their innocent stasis, for their banality, their unhealthy, acidic appearance, like a series of feelings of discomfort, synthetic, as real as tangible, in a truly effective work.

And like every series, the same subject, with dozens and dozens of its marvelous variations, is insistently disseminated in the market, which couldn't be more commercial.

Do you know the anecdote? A long time ago, a gallery owner (forgive me if I don't name them, I still have to decide if I should speak very well or very badly of them) packaged an attractive offer for Schifano. Three billion lire in exchange for ten thousand works.

In 1998, when Mario died, after a life of excesses of which I will gradually speak in the following reviews, he had produced over 24,000 works.

Schifano is everywhere, I still see him today in the most modern films... do you remember "Sorry but I call you love"? well, at the entrance of Raul Bova's house, the prop designers hung a "Campo di Pane... and in "Manual of Love"? In Fabio Volo's kitchen, there's an "Acerbo". And again. In Sordi's movie "Sono un fenomeno paranormale", his bedroom is full... And again, the best: in the movie "Culo e camicia" in the episode with Pozzetto and Mastelloni, while they dance you can spot a spectacular "Palma" that made me jump. Cinecittà overflows...