Mario Schifano
Manifesto del futurismo

THE REVIEW

If art has the duty to tell the story, then Mario Schifano is a leading narrator who rides the concepts that embrace modernity in its entirety, both materially and thematically.

An absolute genius this artist, who never wanted to identify himself with any movement, wrongly associated with Italian pop art, has always created and sought his own idea, immediate and contaminated by circumstances.

I just purchased the manifesto of futurism, an alleged copy or perhaps an original without authentication, a true determinant of the artwork's price.

A white canvas, which should absolutely not be framed, with the monochrome silhouettes of the prophets of futurism, whose centenary is celebrated right now.

Marinetti, Carrà, Balla, Boccioni, and Sironi, are honored by the Roman artist in this famous and minimalist painting, immediate, nauseatingly widespread and all too easily repeatable, as well as repeated to no end by the same artist, who revisited the concept, the subject, as many times as necessary to affirm it in a total and absolute manner.

Like a flyer, an advertisement page, this homage is the intense result of an emotionality spread in the insistence on the repetition of the subject. If you approach the painting, you will notice the characteristic smudges, the famous emotional drippings, which in this case, will appear to the more skeptical as mere smudges due to the artist's ordinariness.

But this painting, in its immediacy, if we want, chemical purity (executed with quick-setting paints) is a perfect protagonist of maniacal, money-sucking art, made on commission, riding the wave and commercial. And today it is still a highly relevant symbol. Hail.