Antonio Murgia is the pioneering ‘Maestro’ who reinvented Italian Contemporary Pop Art. His expressive and intensive colours bring back reminiscences from the Italian group of Pop Artists who began to embrace the values explored in American Pop Art; drastically, changing the meaning of contemporary art after the Second World War: the visual expressions of an economic boom, of history and artistic heritage and the worlds of films and advertising.
The Term Pop Art is indeed the abbreviation of popular art through new technologies and the shapes of mass communication.
However, Antonio Murgia does not invent a revolutionary technique, as he often cites, but rather creates a new iconography. His monumental women faces lost in space and background, are the irreversible impact on the way we see the world and think about Art, through our subconscious, conscious and superconscious. Sensual intense lines of colours create powerful women profiles that seem to liberate our inner emotions: their eyes pierce our souls enlightening them in a burning flame of multiple realities.
My first glimpse of Antonio Murgia’s romantic expressive existentialism was through a phone call, a very long phone call which would not have ended after two hours of endless exchanges among Chaos and Order if were not for attending my very first dinner after two months of ‘corona house arrest’. Antonio Murgia’s voice brought my mind through a virtual pop gallery tour where my emotions were bouncing in bold, overwhelming and colourful strokes leading myself to be the only witness of my subconscious ecstatic fears.
Antonio Murgia’s story is like an oneiric journey: He was born in 1956 in Sarroch, in one of the most fascinating and unspoiled Italian Islands, Sardinia, a suspended land between present and future where colours are born before diffusing in every corner of the world, according to an old saying. This concept of connecting reason and imagination influenced Antonio Murgia throughout his search for identity. He moved with his family to Nord Italy where he studied at the “Accademia delle Belle Arti di Brera” in Milan.
His successful artistic career started to surface the verisimilitude anguish of the present Italian economic instability and therefore, Murgia stopped at once. He worked for an Italian tv channel and even directed the realisation of various films in the late ’80s including the first edition of the Turin Film Festival. He became a musician and only later painting reconverted Murgia to his initial passion: his colourful sensual and powerful strokes being our map through human pathos.
His series ‘Oros Project’ are the epitome of Murgia’s search for the fight and encounter among Order and chaOs, abstract against figurative, man and women, reason and imagination. His words are the most overwhelming poetry whispered to one’s soul: ‘Our existence develops among Chaos and Order… in my work. Chaos is in the eye of the beholder. My work does not generate psychological chaos but a chromatic exasperation through which the observer identify himself from what he sees’.
Illusion is disillusion, reality divides between appearing and being, emphasising the dialogue’s contemplation of ones ‘emotions.
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by Carolina Conforti – Art Historian & Art Advisor