Painting ideas « Roberto Demarchi

Painting ideas

Roberto Demarchi is at the same time both a scholar and painter. His creations stem from the contact between his classical culture – having taught art history – and the pictorial skill of an artist with over forty years of experience.

For Demarchi the act of creation starts from darkness. But it is not the darkness of nihilism: it is the darkness that precedes the origin. It is the moment of oblivion of “academic” study: of philosophy, of the Bible, of arts… Creativity can only be born from forgetfulness: if he remembered, the work could not be renewed and pure. It is the instant in which his pictorial ego dialogues, perhaps unconsciously, with cultural archetypes. And it is in this perfect instant that Demarchi’s painting is born: an idea of light that emerges from the darkness, is charged with chromatic vigour and illuminates those who observe it.

The pictorial idea is expressed in geometric form and is shown though a harmonious arithmetical proportion. An equilibrium that innervates all his work. From the wooden table on which he paints – painstakingly shaped to the millimetre by his trusted carpenter – to the squares and rectangles that are his artistic speech: two-dimensional shapes able to relate the “idea”.

This obsessive search for proportion is not, however, at the cost of creativity: the shapes are made to come alive and move by the colours, the nuances and a continual experimentation of materials and pictorial techniques that give an effect at times two-dimensional and at others three-dimensional.

The man Demarchi aims at creating absolute perfection, but must then come to terms with the fact that there is a part of the work that creates itself: the different reactions of the materials to drying, the unexpected effects of the texture of the colours, the play of light … And it is art – or maybe something divine – that gets the better of the man-painter.
In his knowing humility, he submits to it and – only thus – the work achieves its fullness.Demarchi’s pictorial technique – from the laborious, complex design to the surprisingly rapid painting – betrays his origin as an architect. The table is laid horizontally like a drawing board. First he traces the drawing. Then he works with colours. Then with other materials to give the effect of “relief” and, last of all, he spreads on the black. If, as we have seen, Demarchi’s ideal succession passes from darkness to light, on the contrary he himself works from light to darkness. Now in his mind the idea has already started to paint itself.

From the almost three thousand works already produced, most of which are large, an attempt can be made to try to summarise Demarchi’s abstract painting in the concept of abstract narrations: out of the darkness there appear geometrical images that inspire the spectator with a deep sense of harmony – and, therefore, of beauty – and which, together, are able to narrate a dialogue of the “idea”.

The geometrical proportion allows the “painter Demarchi” to impart through art what the “scholar Demarchi” has measured himself against intellectually: philosophy, the sacred and art. He has debated with pre-Socratic philosophers – questioning himself on the Ark, on the origin – he has meditated at length on pages of the Bible – Old and New Testament – and he has plunged into the beauties of literature – Greek tragedies, Dante… –, of music and of art history.

These encounters have given rise to the best known series of table: the Seven Days of Creation in Genesis, pre-Socratic Philosophers, the Perì Physeos cycle, the tragedies of Aeschylus, the Passion according to Matthew by Bach, abstract revisitations of great masterpieces of art history. Roberto Demarchi has succeeded in painting ideas.