Osvaldo Mariscotti: Flowers & Lightning

Coinciding with Frieze London, Upsilon Gallery is pleased to present “Flowers & Lightning,” a major solo exhibition by Italian-American artist Osvaldo Mariscotti. Spanning the last 30 years of the artist's career, the presentation features new and archival paintings, sculpture, and prints.

Osvaldo Mariscotti’s brightly coloured world is in constant motion. In “Flowers and Lightning”, an exhibition of work from the last thirty years, movement flickers from series to series and from image to image. The language is light-hearted, pure and playful. Sometimes organic and amoebic, in recent years straight-edged and geometric, elsewhere poised between the two. But always filled with pulsing, precisely measured animation.

Mariscotti feels at home amongst the elementary forms of the early modernists. His art accepts these century-old innovations as a natural part of the world we live in, permeating architecture, product and industrial design and typography as much as painting and sculpture. We might think of Oskar Fischinger, electronic rhythms or data visualisations at the same time as Paul Klee or Wassilly Kandinsky. Unlike the work of fellow Day-Glo enthusiast Peter Halley, Mariscotti’s combination of the ostensibly high and ostensibly low is not cynical or critical, but accepting, optimistic and generous. It has an ease, stylishness and serious commitment to pleasure which seems, to me at least, to be somehow typically Italian.

The “Flowers” in the exhibition title originates in Mariscotti’s lively set of screen-prints from 2019, and speaks to the simple, direct gift his work offers the viewer. “Lightning” might make us think of the forking lines that enliven the white spaces of paintings such as “Untitled” (1991), the earliest work in the exhibition, and an example of his “time passage” motif. Lightning also suggests the speed and immediacy of Mariscotti’s art, the sense that we perceive it, almost without thought, in a single instantaneous and vibrating flash of light, colour and spectacle.