Pizziolo, M & Ravasio, R 2024, Marco Carnà. Uova di gallo 1961-1968, enhanced Focus, EdiXion, Milan.
An artist of inexhaustible creativity. Marco Carnà (Carnate, 1929 – Vimercate, 2021) was a forge of ideas throughout his life. This capacity, combined with his technical virtuosity and hard-won freedom from commercial constraints, allowed him to develop autonomous research that ventured to explore numerous linguistic areas. On the other hand, Marco Carnà’s extreme intellectual rigour drove him to channel his research into coherent streams. Consequently, it often happened that stylistic digressions, even very successful ones, were soon abandoned.
A rigorous and Calvinian creative method. The pattern is always the same: Carnà creates a work with an articulated language, develops this language into a coherent aesthetic system, but only in a limited series of works. Then he moves on to something else. This is not the alibi of experimentation that afflicted so much of the last century; it is something more. It recalls the logical architecture of the finest Italo Calvino, that of Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore. The capacity to begin a story, to make us fall in love with it, then to let us slip into another story, soon equally compelling. And so on until the end. Carnà’s works are potential and complete at the same time.
A journey through Carnà’s visual alphabet. This creative approach finds one of its most significant expressions in the cycle that gives the exhibition its title. Uova di gallo (Rooster’s Eggs) is the title of a series of paintings that Carnà created in 1964, exhibited at MUST – Museo del Territorio in Vimercate in autumn 2024. The title itself represents a declaration of anomalous uniqueness: impossible eggs that will never hatch, yet precious, self-referential and charged with potential. The exhibition presents some fifty works that develop coherently, yet in limited edition, an investigation into the rhythm of the sign and the adventure of geometries. A consequence of the anomalous circularity of Carnà’s procedure is that in his works, as in an egg, everything is already there from the beginning. We shall indeed find the primary elements of Marco Carnà’s visual alphabet in his more mature works: as the artist had written, “to each project there always and in any case corresponds a destiny”.
The first systematic rediscovery. The exhibition “Uova di gallo” at MUST in Vimercate represented the first organic study of Marco Carnà’s work. The curatorial work of Marina Pizziolo and Romano Ravasio, conducted through the Marco Carnà Archive, made it possible to reconstruct the coherence of a creative path that only apparently proceeds in fragments, revealing instead a unitary vision that connects the early experimentations of the Sixties to the subsequent developments of the artist’s language. This EdiXion volume completes the initiative by offering a critical examination of the artist’s creative universe.
Enhanced content of the book. Explore the multimedia materials embedded:
– p. 7: Marco Carnà. L’arte salva il mondo (Art Saves the World), RAI 3
– p. 21: The House Museum (VR content)
– p. 23: Sketchbook 1962-65
– p. 64: Living with an Artist. Interview with his wife, Daniela Piazza
