Transmutations
2023
This project consists of a pictorial series and a site-specific installation in Garzón, where the landscape is transformed through water, time, and natural agents. Noris deconstructs territory and matter, balancing control and chance. Thirty square metres of painting and rural objects shape a space of experimentation in which human gesture, memory, and natural processes intertwine.
The project was developed during a residency at Campo Garzón with the support of the Goetstouwers+Limentani Fellowship and the Italian Cultural Institute in Montevideo (Uruguay). Curated by Patricia Betancur.
Series
In December 2023, Marco Noris undertook an artistic residency at Campo Garzón (Uruguay) with the aim of developing a site-specific installation for ArtFest 2023, in the town of Garzón. The residency was conceived as a period of material and territorial research, focused on exploring processes of transformation linked to the landscape and the natural cycles of the environment.
The project is structured around the notion of transmutation, understood as a profound change affecting matter and its very essence. This concept, present in traditions such as alchemy, physics, and spirituality, is here translated into the pictorial field as a transformative process in which the action of water, time, and natural agents directly intervene in the work. During the residency, the artist used the waters of the Garzón stream to produce a series of pictorial records of the territory on paper and canvas, in which the land is represented through the action of water, wind, sun, and rain.
The working process unfolded by accompanying and intervening in these natural phenomena, establishing a deliberately unstable balance between control and chance. Painting thus becomes a field of experimentation in which the boundaries between human gesture and natural process are blurred. Part of the more than thirty square metres of work produced during the residency culminated in a site-specific installation in a tapera in the town of Garzón during ArtFest 2023: a deconstructed landscape that reinterprets the territory through the combination of painting and objects—both natural and artificial—typical of the Uruguayan rural context, shaping a space where matter, memory, and transformation intertwine.
From a Situationist practice, the work of this Italian artist based in Barcelona helps us to understand how we perceive the environment in which we live. How much time do we devote to nature? How do we perceive ourselves in relation to it? Marco Noris’s works are the result of his walks and journeys through landscapes. His paintings are generated from the materials he collects or from the effects of natural phenomena on the surfaces of the papers or canvases he uses. Rain, mud, oxidation, and wind are his allies in the creation of these works.
— Patricia Betancur
Photos: Diego Paz, Diego Weisz, Darío Invernizzi, and Marco Noris.