Marco Crivello’s work is elemental, arresting, muscular, incorporating a layering and overlapping of elements and a porous geology of paint. What fascinates is the technical ingenuity which enables him to be both establishing paint as elemental and at the same time introducing a composition which comments on landscape : the work exists both as product of and in connection with our material world of land, sea and weather. In a sense, his new works are like jewels – intrinsically beautiful, polished objects separated from the land and materials that produced them; decorative, abstract surfaces. But the eye is drawn above, beneath and across those surfaces, dispersing attention on rhythms that promise to come to rest only beyond the frame. On first viewing landscapes that establish tension, cacophony and control, on second glance they are radiant as jewels and drenched with beauty, the result of accretion, spumato and sedimentation and sometimes irradiated with gold. The evidence of process remains in the work and is part of its living rawness. The play of substance on substance, the corrosion and layering of materials, is played out throughout Crivello’s processes of composition and still evident in the finished work, so that built into the eventual stylistic polish is a rhythmically dynamic rawness, creating new potential for extension and endless, unforeseeable possibility.
Sue Roe is a critic and author of The private Lives of the Impressionists and Gwen John: A Life
Marco Crivello is an exciting painter now making his mark. What I like particularly about his work is the tension it sets up between abstraction and representation – creating an open world for the imagination. His work reveals a sensitive appreciation of the recesses of nature, and yet, at the same time, he allows himself the creative freedom to follow the invitation of the paint and the specific brush stroke as it meets the surface. The outcome is an artistic synthesis, which speaks directly to us and resonates with an unmistakable spiritual ring.
Peter Abbs is Professor of Creative Writing at Sussex University and Poetry editor of Resurgence magazine. His most recent volume of poetry is Love after Sappho.
The shoreline is as far as the body can go, the horizon as far as the eye, but the mind overruns both. Limits only prompt it to dream harder: it yearns to be out there, where light breaks the clouds that hang over unseen stretches of sea. This kind of stimulus is basic to Marco Crivello’s paintings. Their tones are deep, their weather bracingly wintry. They are romantic invitations into the gleaming distance, painted by a believer in the imagination.
Their surfaces offer a variety of varnished, burnished, fine-grained textures. For all the chill of the palette they give out a sensual warmth, as much through the tenderness of the paint handling as through the use of underlays of gold. It is as if the eye were ruffling fine fabrics. An exacting standard of craftsmanship is everywhere apparent. The horizon, often the only firm line, runs parallel to the picture edge: the pictures would sit happily in the most minimalist of environments.
Crivello’s subtle and increasingly complex art has gathered force around the line. In his hands the horizon becomes a seam, in both senses – at once the join between two expanses, and a vein of riches to be mined. For mathematicians a line can be a pure idea, but for painters it must always be a material fact. With overlays, maskings, mistings and brushstrokes, he focuses on this fact. Within his high technical specifications, he encourages accidents to inflect it. Small chance shifts of paint suggest whole new areas of feeling. They stir up possibilities above and below, whether in the skies or down at the picture’s base, this side of the water’s brink.
This is a fastidious and thoughtful game, played by a masterly technician. It shares its beach with other gazers such as Caspar David Friedrich and Turner, though of course Crivello’s vision of the horizon, unlike theirs, has nothing to do with plein air sketching. He belongs to a generation working after abstraction, looking up to the lofty portals opened by the likes of Rothko but more knowingly reconciled to a familiar visual experience. Among this generation, he stands out by the warmth, delicacy and pleasurability of his handiwork.
Julian Bell author of ‘What is Painting; Representation and Modern Art ‘by Thames &Hudson.