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“Marco Lusini: The Colours of the Human Soul” Opens Tomorrow at Fiumano Fine Art Gallery

What immediately strikes you while going through Italian artist Marco Lusini’s biography (1936-1989), are the many art forms he experimented with before finding his ideal medium, painting. Photography, lithography, illustration, black ink drawing, not to mention sculpture and poetry, were all fertile ground in which the Siena-born “astronaut of inner space”, as Riccardo Belloni defined him, started his exploration of the human condition. His influences are as numerous as the media he delved into, including sources such as German playwright Bertold Brecht, French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and the primitive Sicilian landscape.

Marco Lusini as photographer on location – Florence 1960s – Private Collection

In the career of an artist, when dust has settled, the time has often come to look back at the whole production with a fresh perspective. The occasion for this for Lusini is the retrospective which opens tomorrow at Fiumano Fine Art Gallery, which hopefully will be a path to a wider, international audience for his work.

Marco Lusini "Untitled" – (late 1970s) – Lithograph – 50x70cm – Private Collection

Marco Lusini: The Colours of the Human Soul is a collective effort curated by London-based filmmaker Laura D’Asta, with New Yorker art historian Gerhard Gruitrooy. As such, the exhibition is also the first organic attempt to go beyond Lusini’s best-known cycles like the Oneiric Landscapes. It aims to shed light on his wider research with a specific focus on universal themes such as loneliness and internal emotions frozen in time, represented by his iconic melancholic human figures set in dream-like worlds.

Marco Lusini, "Untitled" – from Oneiric Landscapes | Acrylic | 80 x 80 cm | 1982 | Private Collection

It’s not by chance that whole project started from the curators’ personal memories and first encounters with Lusini’s art, as The Colours of the Human Soul is explicitly “dedicated to the artist for his lasting inspiration to a younger generation and to a visionary who sincerely believed in the importance of staying true to one’s own artistic values.” The fact that this message comes from London, a city where everything seems to be possible but also stands as a burial of broken dreams, is even more fitting.

The exhibition is on display until 7th July at Fiumano Fine Art Gallery, while other artworks by Lusini will be simultaneously showcased at the American West Valley Art Museum in Peoria (US).