BEATRICE MARCHI
Happy Yellowing

Opening
Saturday 29th February, 6-9pm

Exhibition
04.03.- 30.05.2020

SANDY BROWN is delighted to present Happy Yellowing by Beatrice Marchi. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Berlin. The cycle of Loredana started in 2016 as a hermeneutic avatar of the artist’s own existential gasses, and is hereby introduced by Marchi in its latest emission. We encounter the character of Loredana in a morbid, yet vividly syncopated TV set a la Sunset Boulevard: she lies face down on a customized, black leather, massage bed. Her body seems to have nicely consolidated into a hard, baby scampi carapace. Whether she has just passed away, or is simply out after a long therapeutic session, we don´t know. The backdrop is an enigmatic amarcord sequence painted on different supports: in Ninfeeee, 2020, (acrylic and oil on canvas, led light) and I love Segantini (with J-Lo), 2020, (acrylic, pastel and oil on canvas and wood), the character of Loredana and multiples of hers are portrayed in a variety of labored poses, in proximity of a pool. Time and colors are bound to morphing and Marchi investigates their mutual unfolding.

Fluorescent landscapes after Monet or Segantini merge over a setting that has direct references to Non e’ la Rai, a cult TV show conceived by Gianni Boncompagni and Irene Ghergo, aired every early afternoon on Canale 5 (MEDIASET) from 1991 to 1995. The show inaugurated the philo-Berlusconi genre of Wild-Girls Exploitation, consisting of a variety show where hundreds of girls would perform in frantic ballets, covers of famous songs and telephone games.

Marchi’s iconographic thought balances within a law that could be called the law of leveling, where each part of a whole seems equivalent to the whole itself: each specimen of the genus “woman with claws”, for instance, seems equivalent to the genus as such. The fact that the individual or the species contains within itself the strength of the whole, its meaning and its effectiveness, brings into play the fundamental principle of both the linguistic and the mythical metaphor: a principle that usually expresses itself as pars pro toto. Whoever has seized some part of the whole, has thereby obtained power, in a magical sense, over the whole. What importance this part has for the structure and its connection to the whole, what function it fulfills within it, is here relatively indifferent. It is sufficient in general that it belongs to or has belonged to it, that it has been with it in a connection however slight, to ensure a full aesthetic disembarrassment.