Although at first glance painting and digital image seem to belong to two antithetical dimensions, the first tied to the long timeframes of manual labor, the physicality of materials and a centuries-old stylistic and iconographic genealogy often deemed bloodless, the second to dematerialization, backlit flatness, inventive automatism and the absence of historical perspective, several painters have focused their research on exploring the mutual influences and possible integrations between these two spheres.
Flavio de Marco, “Screen Life”, installation view at Villa delle Rose, 2026, ph. Ornella De Carlo, courtesy MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna | Settore Musei Civici | Comune di Bologna and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
Among the most established figures on the international scene, we might mention Dan Hays (London, 1966), painter of oil landscapes derived from very low-resolution images sourced from webcams or scanned vintage photographs, in which the poor quality of the source image becomes the subject of the work, in a play between Romantic sublime and digital degradation. Or Jacqueline Humphries (New Orleans, 1960), who for twenty years has been working on the intersection between abstract painting and digital language, incorporating emoticons, ASCII codes and CAPTCHAs into her large oil paintings through laser-cut stencils and, more recently, developing textures inspired by white noise and sophisticated fluorescent surfaces evocative of the glow of monitors. Finally, to conclude this rapid overview, Wade Guyton (Hammond, Indiana, 1972), a central figure in the debate on post-digital painting, whose paintings on linen canvas are made using industrial inkjet printers deliberately fed incorrectly to generate glitches, smears and imperfections that become the substance of the work. It is within this line of inquiry that the production of Flavio de Marco (Lecce, 1975) is situated. The artist is the protagonist in Bologna of a major solo exhibition entitled Screen Life, which offers an overview of the evolution of his creative journey through seventy works, made from his beginnings to the present day, divided into nine thematic sections (Self-Portrait, Landscape, Horizon, Souvenir, Views, Fiction, Xenia, Virtual Reality, and Avatar) that explore different stylistic and speculative approaches to the central theme.
Flavio de Marco, “Screen Life”, installation view at Villa delle Rose, 2026, ph. Ornella De Carlo, courtesy MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna | Settore Musei Civici | Comune di Bologna and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
The exhibition traces twenty-six years of work by a mid-career artist who with rare tenacity has always known where to look, even when the subject seemed to elude representation and the reasoning appeared to climb along steep and impossible paths to retrace. In the early 2000s, de Marco began by painting, often at an environmental scale, compositions of empty, partially overlapping screens. These software windows open onto nothing – silent dialogue boxes awaiting an aseptic command – occupy the pictorial field with an ambiguous austerity that, while evoking a certain minimalist abstraction, diverges from it through a mysterious subterranean unease. In the canvases from this phase, almost monochrome and dominated by neutral tones such as pearl grey, washed-out blues and luminous whites, the painterly gesture appears restrained, indeed it disappears, camouflaging itself within the flatness of a surface texture constructed with concealed virtuosity so that the painting causes itself to be forgotten as such. From the outset, the works pose as the fundamental question of the research a reflection on the different ontological status of the painting and the screen in relation to space. If the former represents it, the latter simulates it: two operations that, though similar enough to be confused, are distinguished by what is at stake above all else: the irreducible physicality of painting, here engaged in impersonating the interface with full awareness of betraying it at the moment it cites it, evoking through painterly illusionism impossible suggestions of weight and depth. In this underlying duplicity lies de Marco’s first intuition: digital language is neither the enemy of painting nor its double, but a perceptual condition that painting has the task of metabolizing.
Flavio de Marco, “Mediterraneo”, 2007/2025, acrylic on canvas with insert of acrylic on oil on already painted canvas, 180 x 240 cm, courtesy the artist and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
From the second half of the decade, something shifts: the impenetrable compactness of the desktop cracks open, and through the fissure the world bursts in. The screens begin to host fragments of landscape in the form of shards of figuration inserted as open windows within digital environments, in a mental game of nested boxes that multiplies the levels of mediation. Initially these inserts come mostly from art history; later, landscapes, people, still lifes and interiors taken from life appear, themselves filtered through memory or its visual notation in the form of digital photography. In Mediterraneo (2007/2025), for instance, the sea appears as a detail extracted from a downloaded image, while the interface occupies three quarters of the canvas with its repellent and structured emptiness. In other works, rolling hills, cloud-laden skies, or urban profiles emerge from the spaces left between the browser windows like latent entities claiming their existence through the cracks of the system. This moment is the sophisticated staging of an epistemic crisis: the rediscovered and represented landscape presents itself as a synecdoche of the world in the age of its technical reproducibility, where every figurative element carries inscribed within it the history of its own digital circulation – compressions, color shifts, resizings – and where the diminishing of resolution signals the progressive withdrawal of presence in the process of reworking operated by servers and protocols. In this way, the painter places his epistemological horizon in the world-as-deception of images rather than in reality, in the awareness that the world has definitively disappeared behind its own representation. Painting, consequently, ceases to reflect on the landscape framed by the window and concentrates on the structure of the device that mediates seeing, in order to analyze digital language as the cultural landscape of contemporaneity.
Flavio de Marco, “Souvenir Schifanoia (July)”, 2007, acrylic and digital print on canvas, 152 x 106 cm, Artus collection, London, ph. Ornella De Carlo, courtesy MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna | Settore Musei Civici | Comune di Bologna and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
A further turning point comes with the site-specific project Souvenir Schifanoia (2007), composed of seven canvases and an environmental-scale wall painting, dedicated to the Salone dei Mesi at Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, whose decoration in the second half of the fifteenth century was commissioned by Borso d’Este from the finest painters of the Ferrarese school. In de Marco’s version, fragments of the Renaissance cycle coexist with the graphic structure of Photoshop and blank digital post-it notes, in a hybrid, out-of-focus result that establishes the direction of the subsequent research. From this moment on, de Marco accentuates the historical perspective of his work, engaging systematically with other artists and other eras through a painting that manages to be at once personal and stylistically mimetic. The screens, then, are no longer an autonomous iconic universe, but become the palimpsest of a montage of artistic temporalities and heterogeneous formal specificities that juxtaposes the material depth of oil painting with the surface uniformity of acrylic, the long time of tradition with the instantaneous time of the interface, the manual deliberateness of the painterly gesture with the automatism of the click. The multiplication of windows delimiting each fragment declares the impossibility of synthesis, elevated to a paradigm of contemporary seeing obscured by superstructures and filters that condition our gaze upon the world.
Flavio de Marco, “Screen Life”, installation view at Villa delle Rose, 2026, ph. Ornella De Carlo, courtesy MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna | Settore Musei Civici | Comune di Bologna and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
This position radicalizes into declared invention in the cycle centered on the island of Stella, to which one of the exhibition’s sections is dedicated, an imaginary atoll in the Aegean Sea constructed as a collage of different landscape typologies (desert, mountains, Mediterranean shoreline), for which de Marco has conceived an elaborate tourist guide, with acrylic canvases, marker and graphite and pastel drawings, and an artist’s book published by Danilo Montanari. This playful digression establishes with ironic disenchantment the death of the illusion that landscape could be (and has ever been) a natural category, affirming that it has always been a cultural construct, the unstable product of a system of expectations and conventions codified over time through painting, literature, cartography, photography. It follows that digital panoramas, the replaceable backgrounds of video conferences, and the software for changing at will the scenery of our lives in their digital officiality belong to the same genealogy as Dutch vedute or eighteenth-century travel prints: the difference is not one of nature but of speed and execution mode. De Marco, working on a system of communicating vessels between literature and painting in which the invented island is truer than the real landscape precisely because it declares itself constructed and renounces the deception of naturalness, states with diagnostic precision that fiction is today more than ever the only path toward attempting to access the true.
Flavio de Marco, “Self-portrait in the guise of Georg Gisze”, 2022, oil and acrylic on canvas, 96.3 x 85.7 cm, courtesy MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna | Settore Musei Civici | Comune di Bologna and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
One aspect that emerges when visiting the exhibition at Villa delle Rose is the ease with which the artist moves between radically different stylistic registers without losing conceptual coherence. In the large canvases displayed in the Views and Horizon sections, for instance, the brushstroke is sometimes nervous and material, with dense impasto that cites Abstract Expressionism and constructs surfaces vibrating with kinetic energy, but in contiguous portions of the same painting it can also be fluid and delicate, or scientifically divisionist and all these different inflections are equally contained by the flat, acrylic geometry of the interface. In Self-portrait in the guise of Georg Gisze (2022), the painter confronts openly the sixteenth-century masterpiece by Hans Holbein the Younger, replicating its structure and certain elements with a stylistic fidelity that goes beyond technical quotation (an achievement in itself not within everyone’s reach, especially in the rendering of the reflection of velvet or the transparency of a glass vial) to become a declaration of love. But at the same time, the face appears emptied of psychological and physiognomic characterization, reduced to an anonymous mask, surrounded by other portraits executed by other hands (obviously untrue, the hand is always his) scattered small across a background we realize is nothing other than Photoshop’s layers panel. To subsume the technique of another era is, then, for de Marco a way of making digital anachronism explode on the pictorial plane, revealing its contemporaneity through its act of concealment. From an authorial point of view, what is suggested is a plural ego, elevated to the fragmented condition of subjectivity tout court in the digital age, ensnared in overlapping temporalities, styles and masks that refuse to consolidate into a definitive image.
Flavio de Marco, “Screen Life”, installation view at Villa delle Rose, 2026, ph. Ornella De Carlo, courtesy MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna | Settore Musei Civici | Comune di Bologna and Galleria Studio G7, Bologna
The Avatar section takes this reflection to its most speculative consequences: figures such as the digital influencer Lil Miquela or LaTurbo Avedon, an avatar artist who carries out artistic and curatorial projects (both boasting among their followers none other than the account of Hans-Ulrich Obrist), assume in painting a physical consistency at odds with their immaterial nature,and appear on the same plane of reality as the effigies of existing persons. Robot-artists, nonexistent identities, video game avatars and Instagram pages intermingle with traditional portraiture in a gallery where the distinction between real and virtual has ceased to be relevant. De Marco does not register this indistinction with alarm but treats it as a phenomenological datum, as a condition of seeing that painting is called upon to make manifest. Screen Life is thus an exhibition that gathers and relaunches the challenge of the painted image as an ascertainment of the world, translating into the terms of the present what is, in the end, painting’s principal challenge since its origins. The result is a body of work that speaks of contemporaneity having first created, through the artifice of painting, the necessary distance to see it and to restore to the gaze the temporal density that interfaces, in their mutual impermeability, tend to dissolve.
Info:
Flavio de Marco. Screen Life
Curated by Lorenzo Balbi
1/02/2026 – 29/03/2026
Villa delle Rose
Via Saragozza 228/230, Bologna
www.museibologna.it/mambo
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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