“Untitled13” 80x120	” Untitled12” 80x120	“ Untitled20” 70x80	“Untitled17” 70x120	“Baudelaire” 60x120	“Untitled19” 90x80
“ Untitled10” 90x90	“Untitled14” 90x90	“ Untitled15” 80x120	“ Untitled16” 80x70	“Untitled18” 80x120	“Untitled21” 80x120
“ Untitled11” 60x60

Paintings exposed in Solo exhibition: “Compression”

2003

Galleria d’ Arte Moderna, 7-28 Maggio
Via Crispi , 31
80122 Napoli, Italia

Technique mix: Oil and acrylic on canvas



Critic by Glenda Cinquegrana, IULM Milan, Italy:

The word “compression”, according to the definitions provided by the Italian language dictionary is not a random title, but a real leit motiv that guides and helps us in solving the mistery represented by the artist Marina Iorio.
Painting, for Iorio, is a space of decompression: it is a struggle against the aphasia in which the everyday-life is imprisoned. When the post-modern and the post-industrial society try to throw us in a sort of mediocrity a place where everything has already been communicated, reproduced and consumed, art as it is conceived nowdays, is a dutiful attempt to shake off the banality of being, in order to get back the uniqueness of self.
Moreover Painting is a liberating form of expression vs. the compression exerted from the childhood syndromes and pathologies that pertain to the superficial level of the consciousness or better to that of the unconsciousness, that is to say of the real life.
Painting has got the cathartic function of leading to the surface the visual symbols, that in the light of the artistic pursuit , lose their own dreadfullness. So the anguishes, instead of tracing back to the dimension of the self, traspose themselves - consciously or unconsciously- in the dimension of the collective Self. The paintings hide the fear of the death, of indifference, of war as for “Untitled20” (See below) and of disease. Iorio , as a nowdays woman, reflects and expresses the anxiety of being men- or better of being women- in the world. If we explain Iorio’s art using the typical reasonings of critics by profession - from that reasoning conceiving art as escapism from banality to that conceiving it as psychologic catharsis – we fall into the risk to ignore the qualities of a painting which skillfully plays with a mixture of the pictorial means and the visual signals.
Iorio’s painting uses the colour hovered in its highest tones : peaks of vermillion red and of ultramarine blu. The palette, where the visual influences of the obesessive thecnological world of communication meet each other, keeps the colour in its intense and outrageous chromatic qualities. The pursuit of the colour is not simply an exercise of skill: the work on the chromatic material is experienced by the artist as act of courage, that joins obstinacy – esthetics- to imaginative and moral willingness. Iorio puts her pursuit of colour and her peculiar expressive synthesis side by side, but when it proceeds upon the visual signals through the compression of meaning, it deprives them of its communicative aggressiveness: so the pictorial space becomes icon of pure, fragile and human beauty.

“Untitled 20”
The apotheosis of human destructive foolishness: The war
The archaic figure in the center of the painting, symbolizes the humanity from earliest times to now.
The head reminds of ancient Greeck warriors, the arm, transformed in lance, recalls medieval crusaders, the whole figure inside a metal projectile symbolizes a present- day man enclosed in its violence. The figure, bending its head (that is fury against rationality), is represented in the action to run towards a goal. Such goal is represented by the penetration of the projectile (metal triangle) in a surface (symbol of the sharp line which divides life from death), the impact breaks the surface in several pieces (laceration of human cousciousness). The goal was enter in the realms of death with no means to come back.
The pursuit of the colour hovered in cold tones and the uses of geometric forms, is choosed to create a strong contrast between static and dynamic movements, which flows, avoiding rethorical elements, into dramatic tension.