Marco Pho Grassi: Live Painting Video and Recent Works

Here is a nice video of the Italian artist Marco Pho Grassi painting live. Marco has been experimenting with some new light backed paintings as of recently. This documentation seems to play into that same concept as you are able to watch and observe the artist from the other side of the painting. His signature style involves scratching & scraping layer upon layer until his ideal texture and vision is established.

I have also included some pictures of a recent acquisition of his work that was made for the collection of a private bank. He documented the work, and the tedious task of moving the pieces via a crane. Marco is a true contemporary painter with deep roots in Graffiti. Below is an excerpt about Pho’s work from his website.

GF“A fundamental step towards his present style of painting, which consists of the “contaminated, cryptic and intelligent” evolution of lettering , is represented by the example of Sam Francis, whose exhibition Grassi visits at the Jeu de Paume in 1995 in Paris. “I was struck by the Japanese influences and the emphasized movements in his work. That’s where the idea of a new project on the evolution of letters through painting came from”. So the letter is still the matrix of image creation, even though it sometimes can be hard to identify, as it’s reduced to a syncopated movement that applies colour. And even though the modalities are different (the speed at which one is obliged to work in the streets does not allow for some things that can however be worked on in the protection and calmness of a studio and vice versa), the operational spirit always seems to be the same. It’s not by chance that the first series of paintings made in the studio are entitled “ Dans la Rue ”, as a way to underline the connection to the streets in words as well. Here the relationship between the work in the streets and the work in the studio is established from a visual point of view through the “artificial” and “analogical” reconstruction of the shapes of concretion of urban walls onto the strongly material structures of the canvases. Unto these “texts” loaded with various elements and materials Marco Grassi works alternatively with collage and decollage , applying and removing colour with various means, also and especially by using the typical “weapons” of the streets like the spray can and the sponge.”

-Pho