Marcos Bontempo “Light and Dark” at Ricco/Maresca

Marcos Bontempo’s painterly universe seems to emerge from the timeless space of dreams and nightmares. His images possess the lingering immediacy of apparitions and the malleability of poetic language. Forms often wrestle the latent possibility of disintegration, never losing their mysterious presence as markings on a surface; they remind us of the spellbinding power of the artist’s hand, of alternate worlds emerging out of thin air. Exorcising pain and summoning beauty are here inextricable, yet they meet bravely in a dance where wonderment is preserved intact. “Light and Dark,” presents a selection of Bontempo’s recent body of work reflecting the symbolic role of these two extremes in the artist’s practice, where recurrent themes (kindness and brutality, presence and emptiness, entrapment and freedom) all stem from the fundamental dichotomy of life and death. Somewhere in between, creativity occurs as a kind of active chiaroscuro, where the artist contends with his obsessions through phases of lucidness and uncertainty.