Biography
Marco Petrus was born in Rimini in 1960, but has been living with his family in Milan since his childhood.
A child of art - his father, Vitale Petrus (Kiev, 1934 - Milan, 1984), was a protagonist of the Lombard artistic scene of the sixties and seventies - he has been interested from a very young age in architecture, as well as in experiments related to printing techniques and artistic reproduction. He graduated from the course for graphic assistants at the Umanitaria in 1980 and from the art high school in 1984, the year he enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture at the Polytechnic of Milan, which he attended for a short period. After his father's death, he opened an art printing press, which became a meeting place for other artists, a prelude to his debut as a painter in 1991 with a solo exhibition in Milan.
The paintings of the early period are characterized by a strongly marked and insistent use of line, a legacy of his training and experience as an engraver. However, in these works, one can already glimpse that almost metaphysical immobility of architecture, which will later characterize his work as a constant "trademark". From the early years, he showed a great interest in architecture, especially that of Milan, particularly in its "archetypal-mythological" aspect typical of the thirties and forties, the founding nucleus and precursor of the extraordinary urban developments of the Lombard capital in the following decades. The artist's research is conducted on the thread of stylization, through a process of constant subtraction of elements from the city's chaos: thus, he comes to represent, of the landscape, only what is necessary - the subtle symbolic framework that a city is made of and that it feeds on day after day. Petrus surveys Milan with the gaze of someone who is not interested in capturing only the individual details, those corners and glimpses that, in their dry and rigorous solidity, contain alone the very idea of the city, its oldest and immutable essence. Over time, Petrus's line disappears, giving way to an increasingly rigorous and linear play of colors punctuated by clear and well-defined lines and flat fields, in a search for essentiality and linearity of composition that will characterize his research more and more. Between the late nineties and the early 2000s, his painting undergoes a new perspective shift, opening up his analytical gaze to investigate more rigorously the structure of urban and architectural forms - even collaborating with institutes and faculties of architecture in different countries - while also embracing, with his strongly characterized gaze, examples of recent or less recent urban forms of many European, American, and Asian cities and megalopolises, almost as if sketching out a varied mapping of the infinite architectural forms existing in the world. His work thus seems at times to take on the appearance of a reasoned sum of all possible urban typologies, revisited through the artist's peculiar pictorial style. His most recent turn leads him, in a work of increasing stylization of form, first to accompany urban representations with their "correspondences" on the plane of abstraction (lines, signs, simple colored tiles, where originally there were perspectives, angles, and windows); then to "freeze" the very form of the urban landscape in a pure play of abstract stylizations. In this way, painting, with its increasingly analytical analysis of the "space" of the form starting from the icons of the contemporary landscape, progressively changes its language and its formal approach on the canvas, gradually detaching itself from the simple figurative reprisal of elements and glimpses of the urban landscape, to become, instead, a rigorous and impeccable research on the "pure form" of architecture. The work of analysis of the original form thus becomes the pretext for a broader search for the meaning of painting and representation.
