Mario Airò, Watercolour

One of the most active artists of his generation has conceived a large-scale intervention for the 2021 edition of Hypermaremma. . Mario Airò’s work will be an act of transfiguration of the landscape through a powerful laser beam that is activated from dusk until late at night. The artist’s intention is to show the monumental energy of the Orbetello lagoon through dynamic drawings projected on the water, which will enter into a direct and casual relationship with the landscape and the naturalistic beauties of the place. Asemantic traces of moving light will be in daily contact with the motionless surface of the lagoon landscape, making it the protagonist and a work of art itself. A performance will be staged, whose participants will be the portions of water and the static surfaces on which the light rays will be projected, highlighting the landscape through energies that will offer a supernatural vision.

The artist’s words reveal the importance of the surrounding landscape: “Art takes refuge in nature with a little disdain for its celebrated worldliness and enjoys its autonomy. He devectorialises the spectacle by reducing it to an end in itself and seeks a less congested territory to defend his original innocence, to let its nature be. And here it pays tribute to the forces that made it great: without a basically mixed thought the world has no voice and art as its bridge to us even less. It is that confused coexistence of impressions and meanings that it needs to prepare a field of action of a certain vastness capable of extrapolating its potential.”

Sponsored by MAG assicurazioni

With the patronage by Comune di Orbetello

Biography

Mario Airò was born in Pavia (1961). He lives and works between Genoa and Milan.

After studying in Milan with Luciano Fabro, he animated the self-managed space in Via Lazzaro Palazzi in the first half of the 90s together with some other artists. He has been a lecturer for several years at the Laboratory of Art at the Faculty of Arts and Design at IUAV in Venice. Mario Airò’s artworks comes to life with the intention of inducing emotional moods and sensations in the viewer. Composition of objects, images, texts, sounds and light sources play with the enchanting and seductive effect to transform environmental exhibition in enveloping mental spaces able to restore the meaning of a dreamed rather than lived life. An integral part of his tributes to existence is also the care of the cultural research behind the works, such as background not exhibited but very deep. Airò embodies a way of conceiving artistic language devoid of any dogma and free.

Among the most important exhibitions in which he has participated: Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2005); 51. International Exhibition of Art La Biennale di Venezia (2003); Kwangju Biennale (Korea 2004); 47. International Exhibition of Art Biennale of Venice (1997).