Biography
Marco Fantini was born in Vicenza in 1965. He lives and works between Milan and Hoi An (Vietnam).
In 1983 Marco Fantini enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture in Venice, followed the photography courses of Italo Zannier and developed a passion for portrait photography, elaborating in the following years a personal research work focused on the themes of diversity and alienation. The meeting with Paolo Fossati dates back to 1987, the partial abandonment of photography and the creation of collages and acrylics on canvas with a strong comic connotation, the following year the first exhibition Oltre il canale at the Centro Civico della Giudecca in Venice. In 1989 he traveled to Mexico where he lived for two years, working as a designer in the studio of Enrique Norten (architect present at the Architecture Biennale in 1997) and dedicating himself to research on the life of the Friulian photographer Tina Modotti. In these years he meets various artists including Manuel Alvarez Bravo and is interested in Mexican mural painting with particular reference to the works of Rufino Tamayo. The creation of the first oil paintings and the definitive choice for painting dates back to this period. In 1989 he exhibited in Mexico at the Centro de Cultura Coyoacan, after his debut. The years between 1991 and 1994 are characterized by a marked material experimentation of a vague Dubuffettian origin, leading him towards the current definition of his style. These are the years in which, returning to Italy, the artist concentrates on an experimental painting rich in expressionistic elements.
In his images, the result of a tireless elaboration of the pictorial material, the portraits and ghostly figures refer to the language and work of authors such as Bacon and Dubuffet. In 1992 he was invited to exhibit at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice, Young photography in the Veneto, with a catalog edited by Italo Zannier, at the Bugno Samueli Gallery and in San Francisco, thus crossing the Italian borders again, within the International Grant for a social photography event at the Mother Jones Institute of S.Francisco. In 1995 he conceived a series of portraits based on the ideal cross between Leonardo's "The Last Supper" and the events of the Borgias, as well as the application of the same expressive methods to the iconographic statute of Mickey Mouse, a subject that still recurs today in his painting as an attempt at dramatization within the myth it represents. This, as well as the other stereotypes of communication, become, in this perspective, not the emblem of mass expressions but archaeological finds of a past and a childhood which one looks at with nostalgia. In these years he exhibited in 1995 at the Daniele Romere Gallery in Malo, the following year at the Casa dei Carraresi in Conegliano Veneto, on the occasion of Paintings - The feeling and the form - Italian artists of the 50s and 60s, with publication by Marco Goldin and in the Gallery of Arts, Spazio Lanzi, in Bologna. He comes into contact with the Amedeo Porro gallery where he creates a solo show with catalog and texts by Marco Vallora and Emilio Tadini in 1997, followed by participation in a group show of great appeal at Palazzo Sarcinelli in Conegliano (TV) entitled Palazzo Sarcinelli 1988 - 1998 – A donation for a new museum in 1998.
2001 is the year of the personal exhibition in the premises of the Poggiali and Forconi art gallery entitled Genesis of a painting, with a critical text by Alberto Fiz; exhibition which then moved to the Galleria Il Castello in Trento. A new period opens in which the surface is freed more frequently from multi-material layers, while facing for the first time the three-dimensionality of terracotta sculptures or mirrors, on which the signs of a tireless search for the definition of the image.
