With works marked by a strong performative component, Andrea Marinelli reflects on the perception of reality. What he seeks to bring out of the image is the physical component that he recognises in the pixel as an autonomous material with a dignity of its own. Marinelli began his career in the music field collecting a sampling of sounds from remote languages and dialects in which he intervenes with digital techniques to disarrange their meaning so that the melody of the language can emerge without the original source being recognised. Later, he focused on figurative languages and since 2010 has focused on photographs taken of television screens, especially of ‘60s films. By stopping the flow of the pictures with a photograph, but without using the frame technique, he offers fragments of independent pictures to viewers, showing the original matter they are made of. In 2013 he organised Secretshow, a performance in which he put together pictures, sounds, and context. This performance was presented in different places with diverse functions that the artist wanted to reinterpret, projecting photographs printed on tracing paper directly onto the architecture with an overhead projector and modulating the sound with a computer. The sequence of the projected photographs and the sound were improvised but organised in a way that produced an emotional build-up, and as a result, created a different action at every performance where the audience received various input to create personal visual connections.
Secretshow represented the starting point for Marinelli’s subsequent research on the perception of the reality of images; for instance, as in the series Renaissance of sciaman dance (2017) where photographs of Mongolian shaman costumes and statues from the first period of the European Renaissance are juxtaposed to offer a superimposition of cultures and images. This is an overtly digital manipulation by means of which the artist refers to the idea of digital as a mental state where, by being subjected to several visual and sound stimuli, new images are created.
Andrea Marinelli (Milan, 1985) began his career as a musician in 2005, after studying music with Phil Minton, Walter Donatiello, Joelle Leandre, Eleonora Dettole, Bruno Chevillion, Giovanni Tommaso, and Tiziano Tononi, while he also studied mixing and electronic music with Lorenzo Pozzi. In 2010, without formal art education, he approached visual art creating audiovisual installations for museums, public and private spaces.
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