Marco Bizzarri: Cielo Abierto

Megan Mulrooney Gallery is pleased to present Cielo Abierto, an exhibition of new paintings by Sussex-based, Chilean artist Marco Bizzarri.

The paintings in Cielo Abierto are deeply atmospheric. From afar, lattices of light and architectural forms come into view through a quasi-pointillist technique resembling dust or film grain. Up close, however, the surfaces dissolve into particulate fields of color. These paintings translate Bizzarri’s photographic encounters with the Atacama Desert in northern Chile into densely layered paintings built from thousands of small, fast-drying marks.

Each canvas carries the logic of dust itself, one of accumulation, suspension, and slow transformation. But Bizzarri’s process begins prior to painting—as he wanders the desert, photographing abandoned structures, furniture, and tools left behind by mining communities. He seeks out particular vantages at the beginning and end of the day, when sunlight pierces openings in walls and roofs and dust becomes visible in the air. The same matter that once composed these structures now floats through them as dust. In the Atacama, therefore, the ever-open sky and constant light create an environment where matter transforms and dust becomes a metaphor for persistence: a latent presence that reminds us that absence does not imply disappearance, but rather a silent form of permanence.

In the studio, Bizzarri begins his painting process by consulting his photography archive. Then, working with acrylic and oil paint, he builds each composition through layers of small, flicked or stippled gestures, letting pigment drift and settle before applying the next pass. From a distance, the works appear structured and architectural—rooms, beams, and ladders held in clear geometry—but their surfaces are porous, as though vibrating with minute specks of color. That tension between line and dot, between solidity and dispersion, drives the works in the exhibition.

In Cielo Abierto, this relationship between light, matter, and time marks the threshold where the earthly and the transcendent meet. Light, the central theme of the exhibition, not only illuminates but also penetrates and redefines spaces, revealing the invisible and transforming our perception of the environment. Like the abandoned houses of the desert, whose open roofs allow the light to pass through and the sky to enter within, the work proposes a dialogue between the intimate and the immense, between the constructed and the natural. More than a representation, the exhibition seeks to explore the movements, reflections, and atmospheres generated by light, establishing a connection between the ruin and the sky, between what exists and what passes through. Thus, it invites us to look beyond the visible and to understand light as the essential link between the material and the infinite.

In all, the exhibition explores a central paradox of the Atacama desert, a landscape defined by both erosion and preservation. Light is his main instrument, cutting across the compositions as it does through the dust he photographs. Throughout, Bizzarri captures the moment when structure gives way to atmosphere, when what’s left behind becomes the material through which we see.

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 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; Rubedo Art Projects, Milan, 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.