Italian Scottish Artists at the Demarco Archive
This past Thursday night I attended the opening of Italian Scottish Artists, an exhibition of seven artists of Italian heritage who are taking part in the cultural development of Scotland. The exhibition has taken over several rooms of the Richard Demarco Archive at the Demarco European Art Foundation at Craigcrook Castle in Edinburgh, and is linked to a further exhibition of their work at the Italian Cultural Institute on Nicolson Street in Edinburgh. The artists were selected by the Italian government and cultural institute from a shortlist of 15, and represent a wide spectrum of media, subject matter and style; however, each was to some degree inspired by Craigcrook. The Demarco Archive itself exists as a range of modern and contemporary artistic endeavours arranged not according to genre, medium or artist, but according to nationality. The space is broken into niches filled with two- and three-dimensional art simply labelled with its country of origin. Admittedly frustrating for the viewer who would like to know anything and everything about a particular piece, but perfect for creating an Aladdin’s cave-like atmosphere, wherein each alcove brings new visual enjoyment.
The Italian Scottish Artists exhibition, developed to celebrate 150 years since the unification of Italy, links thematically to the World’s Fair-esque composition of this year’s Venice Biennale by visually establishing the links of a country (in this case, Scotland) to Italy via the artists (if not the subject matter). While small in size, Italian Scottish Artists is an exhibition that promotes artists who are not yet widely recognised in Scotland—and Richard Demarco—and fits in perfectly within Demarco’s eclectic archive of his own work and the work of artists he has collected over his long career. The artists, Anna Constantinou, Patrizio Belcampo, Lisette Degioanni, Owen Logan, Francesca Nobilucci, Giovanni Giacoia and Richardo Demarco, were chosen for their ethnic and geographic family heritage and their artistic merit, not because their art sticks to one clear theme.
Like the portions of Demarco’s archive that are on display at Craigcrook, Italian Scottish Artists is arranged without traditional gallery labels to list the artist, title, medium and a short description. Instead, the artists have written their own statements to assist the viewer in the interpretation of their work. The pieces vary between sculpture, painting, photography and many media in between, and certainly suit a variety of tastes.
The artists whose work stood out for me are Patrizio Belcampo and Lizette Degioanni. Belcampo describes himself as revisiting the tradition of printmaking in the two of his pieces that share a wall in the exhibition. These two pieces are the inverse of each other; one an orange print on a white background of a hive of wasps, the other the actual stencil for the print layered on a beige background. Together, Belcampo’s pieces are visually stimulating and striking, and they kept my eye fixed on them for some time. In Belcampo’s own words (in the exhibition material), printmaking was the ideal medium for him to explore because of ‘the necessity to resolve the image as a combination of chromatic layers’. He was able to ‘reduce the designs to their simplest forms’ through ‘the use of flat, interlocking colour fields and rejection of a descriptive outline’. Lizette Degioanni produced a series of paintings and drawings for the exhibition, each with a timeless quality documenting the convergence of sculpture and painting. Inspired by nature, Degioanni creates charcoal scenes of sculptures in abstracted natural surroundings. Her work has a feeling of sadness, but intriguingly draws the viewer’s eye deep within the composition. Although depicting frozen figures, Degioanni’s work is imbued with a refreshing enlivening quality, in a way (albeit very un-arty) that can be appreciated by fans of Doctor Who’s not-so-stone angels.
Overall, Italian Scottish Artists fits in seamlessly with the Demarco Archive in scale and substance. If you prefer your art in a traditional gallery space and like your gallery labels clear and concise, this is not the exhibition or the archive for you. In fact, it could be argued that the curation of the exhibition seems to hold up the art alone, leaving the artist behind. Great for taking a knock out of the cult of the artist, but perhaps not so great for their interpretation of the viewer. However, as a grown woman who still checks every wardrobe for a route to Narnia, the endless nooks & crannies, cubbies and niches of Italian Scottish Artists and the Demarco Archive was right up my alley. For the fans of contemporary art, the Demarco Archive is something you really should make the effort to go and see once; where else can you visit such an extensive and unique example of over 50 years of top-class contemporary art in a castle?
-Joanna Todd
