Osvaldo Mariscotti: Kaleidoscope

Upsilon Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its new space at 23 East 67th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with an inaugural exhibition "Kaleidoscope," featuring multi-media works by Italian-American artist Osvaldo Mariscotti. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.

Mariscotti dedicates much of his practice to the study of human perception and the interaction of form and color. Taking cues from his artistic predecessors of non-objective and minimalist practice, Mariscotti maintains a resolute and programmatic rejection of the visual referent, and an affirmation of an autonomous artistic language that is both armed with a semiotic understanding of the creation of meaning and grounded in its own material properties. Ongoing experimentation with techniques within painting, sculpture and printmaking allows him to develop a new language, a code of sorts, to realize a playful dance straddling the worlds of the organic and inorganic into his intensely worked yet fresh and refined surfaces.

He maintains a profound affinity with the linguistic insights articulated by lyrical poetic practices, celebrating the direct expressive qualities of the basic units of color as language — letters and words. Mariscotti’s method at first seems arbitrary, with chance playing a major role in the paintings, but, with closer examination, reveal a methodical if not mathematical precision, referencing models of conceptual allusion and illusion.

Despite the myriad colors and complexity of forms in his work, he manages to deftly arrange and choreograph his mark making to create a sense of harmony. In the end, Mariscotti’s artworks leave the viewer with a renewed, joyful, and meaningful experience, one with a sense of appeal and sensory indulgence.

"Jerry Saltz once called Mark Rothko’s work “Buddhist Television” because of the effect his paintings have on the eyes and spirit of the viewer. Mr. Mariscotti’s work is not totally dissimilar from the experience of Rothko. Not as grand, but not nearly as painful or pessimistic."

 

- Hazen Cuyler, "Upsilon Gallery Opens with First Exhibit," East Side Feed, 2022

"Take the time to examine this unique collection and soon their colorful vibrations radiate beyond the canvas, triggering our sensations and provoking primordial meaning. The playful shapes, childlike colors, and overall cleanliness contradict left over pencil lines. We contemplate eternal order and fate through a clear biological lens, while regularly confronted by an image of the artist, as draftsman, at work."

 

- Hazen Cuyler, "Upsilon Gallery Opens with First Exhibit," East Side Feed, 2022

"Osvaldo Mariscotti invece offre una soluzione scultorea alla scomposizione cromatica, elevando i quattro colori rosso, verde, arancio e giallo come strutture tridimensionali, poggianti su di un principio basico nero che ha la funzione di rendere più assoluti i colori. È come se i quadri di Mondrian prendessero vita e si muovessero cibernetici sui piani, elevandosi a fasce solide, a bandiere incontaminate, a stendardi si purezza."

 

Osvaldo Mariscotti offers a sculptural solution to chromatic decomposition, elevating the four colors red, green, orange and yellow as three-dimensional structures, resting on a black basic principle that has the function of making the colors more absolute. And as if Mondrian's paintings were to come to life and moved cybernetically on different planes, rising as solid strips, as pristine flags, as banners of purity.

 

- Daniele Radini Tedeschi, "Tiltestetica: Neotransavantgarde," Editoriale Giorgio Mondadori, 2014

"Informed and inspired by the exploration of principles between relationships connecting the idealistic analogies of Mondrian, Kandinsky, Duchamp and Cubo-Futurism, Osvaldo states, 'I like the work of Klee and Xul Solar too. But I always make a concerted effort always to try to remain independent of other artists' views and forms of expression, in order to remain original in my work.'"

 

- Estelle Lovatt, "Osvaldo Mariscotti," Art of England, 2010

"The exhibit propels us forward and we engage with obsessive, but playful, examinations of scale. Like gazing through the titular instrument, “Kaleidoscope” acutely defines our experience. Each new canvas offers a fresh rotation and the shapes you observed moments before are rearranged or replaced by some new configuration."

 

- Hazen Cuyler, "Upsilon Gallery Opens with First Exhibit," East Side Feed, 2022