Markus Delago
∗1964, Italy
lives and works in Ortisei, Italy
Sculpture apprenticeship with Hermann Josef Runggaldier. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, lives and works in Ortisei. Like surfaces that network and spread on the surface like "graffiti" in the urban centres of the cities, over public facilities and walls walls. Markus Delago conducts lively colour experiments, from graffiti to his own footprints.Markus Delago directs his analyses toward a conceptual and abstract field, examining the formation of creative attitude with rigorous irony. With the action “Rhythm for the Dissolution of a System,” he engages us by playfully presenting the relationship between fullness and emptiness.
If one were to paraphrase a rabbinical saying, we might recognize that our attention is often drawn more to the vase than to its contents. The artist emphasizes precisely the vase — that is, the outlines of the figures — by deliberately using the same shade of yellow as traffic signs. In both cases, the color frames emptiness, setting a boundary around the negative rather than the positive space.
The spray paint he employs — airy and extremely thin in substance — seals the absence of tangibility in the outlines drawn on the ground near the South Tyrolean Savings Bank, the site of a bank robbery in 2006. Of the actual people present that day, only traces of their physical shells remain, represented as shadows whose already fading past can barely be retraced.
The viewer’s initial bewilderment when confronted with Markus Delago’s work transforms into a focused observation of these very forms, which are all that remain of that event — like empty bottles left scattered after a public gathering, as the artist himself suggests. Delago reconstructs the essential framework of a past moment, much as a priest simplifies the solemnity of an original liturgy.
In doing so, the artist decisively underscores the significance of the intellectual and inventive moment of the work, leaving his “action” behind like a splinter of truth embedded in our emotional imagination.
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