Pizziolo, M & Ravasio, R 2026, Marco Carnà: uno scomodo genius loci. Cronaca di una riscoperta, enhanced Focus, EdiXion, Milan.
The choice of an artistic name, the choice of a destiny. Marco Carnà was born in 1929 in Brianza, in Carnate, and until 2021 lived in the same place: the one from which he had chosen to take his name (Carnà is the ancient name for Carnate) abandoning that surname, Colombo, which would have relegated him to a grey homonymy shared by hundreds of Lombards. Yet, in the decision to bind himself with his artistic name to the place where he decides to live for his entire life, there is no exhibition of a bond, the vocation of an origin. Marco Carnà was not an artist of Brianza and we could not do him a worse disservice than defining him thus. And with him to us. Because that key does not open the door to the universe of signs, forms, colours and stories that Carnà stubbornly inhabited.
To a great industrialist who one day presented himself in his studio, looking for a beautiful landscape of Brianza, the artist replied, throwing open a window: “There are as many as you want”. And he dismissed him.
“On my failures I have built my freedom”. Failures? Carnà lived in Milan, between the 1950s and 1960s, a creative season that is history, frequenting powerfully innovative artists, such as Piero Manzoni or Enrico Castellani. Carnà experienced artistic-social experiments, such as the Quartiere delle Botteghe, the not yet investigated artistic commune, created in the working-class stronghold of Sesto San Giovanni between 1964 and 1967, sharing dreams and disappointments with Enrico Castellani, Agostino Bonalumi, Arturo Vermi, Luciano Fabro, Turi Simeti or Hidetoshi Nagasawa. He exhibited in Milan, Rome, London, Paris, Zurich, Toronto, Minsk, Saratov. He created public works, such as the stained glass windows for the Duomo in Monza, which are a measure of his ability to use art to tell the stories of God, as well as those of men or of characters born from the pen of Dante Alighieri, Nikolaj Gogol’ or Lautréamont.
A proud coherence. A fine array of failures, there’s no denying it. But the common thread of his artistic nomadism was not the overused alibi of research, but the need for a proud coherence with his ideas. Because the thing that Marco Carnà had chosen, and for which he fought all his life, was to be a free man. And therefore uncomfortable. An artist who worked on complex extroversions, in the years when this technique was the frontier of a new dimension of the painting, but who did not linger on those forms in a complacent repetition. And for this reason today those works of his are the remains of a living idea and not modules produced for a complicit market. An artist who created his own formal alphabet, in those superstructures that invent and lay bare the primary framework of reality, in those tangles of “tubes”, energy channels of a thought never satisfied with the new. An artist who drew thousands of tables, traversing with his pen the infinite labyrinths of the sign.
A story yet to be written. Crossing the threshold of his house-studio in Carnate, today headquarters of the Marco Carnà Archive, is entering a timeless place, guarded by his “limpid” Daniela. Here everything has remained as he left it. It is up to us now to write his story, before the wind of time disperses the precious sand mandala that Marco Carnà composed day after day, for years, with a joy of making art that was the necessary reason for his living as a free man.