An exhibition cured by de Paolo Bolpagni and Giovanni Battista Martini, from 12th february until 2 july 2023. Catalogue Dario Cimorelli Editore. Under the auspices of the Municipality of Lecce.

The fourth exhibition of the Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud will be inaugurated on Saturday 11 February at 7 p.m. The exhibition is dedicated to Mirco Marchelli, a highly original composer-artist who has conceived a sort of “total work” for the Foundation spaces, comprising a six-voice piece in three parts, diffused through loudspeakers in the rooms, creating a true sound installation, and a unitary nucleus of eighteen ad hoc created polymathic works.

Voci in capitolo (Voices in Chapter) is a project created for the Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud: in each of the three rooms of the exhibition, six works, for a total of eighteen, are hung on the white walls, constituting a compact cycle, and a recording of the original composition written on verses by Edoardo Sanguineti is heard through a sophisticated audio system, thus uniting the visual element with the musical one.

Mirco Marchelli was born in Novi Ligure in 1963. He lives and works in Ovada, in the province of Alessandria. A creator with multifaceted skills, he has been developing his first works in the field of visual arts since the mid-1990s, in continuity with his musical research. The interpretative keys to his work are memory and the fascination that emanates from everyday objects: flagpoles, stools, small pieces of furniture, pieces of wood or fabric, books, account books, registers, boxes and photographs are coated with a layer of wax that eternalises and transfigures them. Marchelli restores life and meaning to these materials, using the stories of which they are an expression to tell something new; he does not merely evoke memories, but arouses suggestions that are not folded up in a vague reminiscence of the past. His being an artistcomposer, or rather a composerartist, is not an incidental element, or a biographical coincidence (for a few years he was a trumpet player in Paolo Conte’s band), but rather the key to accessing the singular world he has constructed. Borrowing the language of music criticism, one could say that Marchelli proceeds by plastic modulating progressions and ornamentations. Both in one sphere and in the other, he chooses “ingredients” that are very varied in terms of material, appearance and origin, he blends and elaborates them all with very freeways and fantastic flair, yet according to rigorous methods, just as a composer does, and to those “old things” that he recovers he gives new meaning and flavour, exploiting their “resonances”. Since 2017, Marchelli has also been experimenting with ceramics.

The opening will be attended by Dominique Rimbaud, president of the Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud; Paolo Bolpagni, scientific director of the Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud and co-curator of the exhibition; Giovanni Battista Martini, co-curator of the exhibition; and Mirco Marchelli, artist and composer.