The Armory Show: Marco Bizzarri

For The Armory Show, Megan Mulrooney presents a solo exhibition of paintings by Marco Bizzarri (b. 1988, Santiago, Chile; lives and works in West Sussex, United Kingdom). Influenced by Divisionist and Pointillist principles, his painting centers on the relationship between light, time and perception.

 

Working from direct observation, Bizzarri moves through rural landscapes, desert areas and abandoned spaces - both in his native Chile and the English countryside where he now lives - in search of places that allow for a more conscious relationship with time and one's surroundings. From this movement comes a central question in his work: how to recover silence and stillness in a life saturated with stimuli?

 

Against that acceleration, his paintings propose a slower temporality, one in which attention makes it possible to perceive what usually goes unnoticed: the way light falls on a wall or a shadow shifting slowly over a chair. Minimal phenomena that, observed closely and at length, reveal the complexity of the everyday.

 

Light occupies a central place in his work as a force that continually transforms our experience of reality: it alters color, texture and distance, and with them our emotional relationship to a place. Bizzarri is drawn to what already inhabits the real but becomes visible only in certain moments of light - the dust particles suspended in the air, the mist, the marks left by time on an old pane of glass. His painting, therefore, does not seek to represent the hidden, but to create the conditions in which it can be perceived.

 

This concern with attention extends to his technique. Bizzarri draws on Divisionism and Pointillism, and in particular on the Italian Divisionists' investigations into light, colour and optical mixing. Rather than premixing tones on the palette, he establishes relationships between pure colors: up close, the surface unfolds into thousands of independent dots and lines; from a distance, these merge into a unified atmosphere. This shift in perception reflects his interest in contemplation: what appears fragmented up close only coheres if one stays long enough for new relationships to emerge.

 

Marco Bizzarri (b. 1988, Santiago, Chile; lives and works in West Sussex, UK) graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 2014 and then studied at Turps Art School Studio Painting Programme in 2022. His solo exhibitions include Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles, CA; Night Café, London, UK; Galería Patricia Ready, Santiago, Chile; INCUBATOR, London, UK; Unit 1 Gallery, London, UK; and Galería Animal, Santiago, Chile; among others. He has participated in group exhibitions at The Sunday Painter, London, UK; Lamb Gallery, London, UK; Palm Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan; Rolando Anselmi, Rome, Italy; and Cooke Latham Gallery, London, UK, among many others. He has been awarded the de Laszlo Foundation Award, the Gilbert Bayes Award, among others, and has been in residence in IM Art Residency, The Fores Project, High House Residency, Unit 1 Gallery, and Centro ARC.

 

His public and institutional collections include:

Government of Cantabria Collection, SpainAstillero City Council Art Collection, SpainX Museum, Beijing, ChinaGalila's POC Collection, BelgiumCa.Sa Collection, Chile
His work is also held in private collections in the United States, England, France, Taiwan, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, Bahrain, Peru, and Chile.