Biography
Marco Verrelli was born in Rome in 1961.
A self-taught artist, he has exhibited in numerous shows in Italy and abroad, particularly in Rome where he has held most of his solo exhibitions, including the one hosted at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in 2001.
Marco Verrelli is an artist who has been able to elaborate and develop one of the main lines that characterize 20th-century Italian art, that vision that captures the core of mystery hidden in the things that accompany us every day. This gaze is the one that, from de Chirico to Boccioni, from Sironi to Scipione, focuses on buildings, streets, or coasts with their lighthouses, discovering the vital and unknown core of their presence, an aspect that we had not been able to see and that instead was there all along, ready to manifest itself. In this sense, the other reference to Edward Hopper (an anticipator of hyperrealistic vision), which is often correctly mentioned when talking about Verrelli, has its evident connection with the Italian context already proposed, also for the de Chirico influence that the lighthouses of the American master denounce, linked to the metaphysical towers of the pictor optimus, in a relationship that is clearly felt especially in the lighthouses painted by Verrelli. For this reason, when one notices the reflection of a neon light on a tram, the setting sun that gives a particular tone to the paint of a lattice, or the sky reflected on the chrome of a guardrail, one cannot help but think of the revelatory capacity that belongs to Verrelli's paintings, his sensitivity in discovering unexpected connections in what surrounds us. Following the necessity of that "architectural" vision that, from de Chirico's Italian squares onwards, deeply marked the vision of the 20th century, from Dalì to Hitchcock to postmodern designs or a video game like ICO, Verrelli indeed discovers the urban mystery of pylons and overpasses, the arcane of lighthouses and roads stretching over the sea, the transit of passengers in airports and the stillness of those waiting for something, visionary images of a future, signs of a metaphysical vision of representation transferred to painting, to which Verrelli gives his personal code. In his evolutions, Marco Verrelli's path has nevertheless been supported by a constant attention to pictorial quality centered on a solid technical ability from which results of sure and undoubted mastery arise. Based on this foundation, Verrelli has given life to a path of formal and mental purification that has constantly rarified the elements of his paintings without losing the plastic solidity that is one of the most important elements and one of the founding centers of his work.
"Marco Verrelli's painting, in its refined and rigorous execution, seems to be born to represent the forms and matter of a parallel world, the many realities of an alternative dimension where everything has been replaced and where nature appears reconstructed in an absolutely artificial way. Not by chance, Verrelli prefers metal, plastic, neon lights that shine on objects and buildings often placed in aseptic places, territories where the presence of man appears superfluous and almost disturbing, in works where color often ignites with chemical luminescence and acidic splendor" (Lorenzo Canova).
He lives in Rome.
