Contemporary renaissance
Morof’s recent production has been developed through the congregation with the late Gothic and Renaissance age. His works in pastel or acrylic on canvas, imitate the cautious and detailed way the grand masters’ masterpieces - Masaccio, Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Raffaello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, just to mention a few - ; he creates their representations keeping them the same size as the original works using a quick, light, coloristic touch, and is for sure traceable to the stylistic figure of Morof as a tattooist.
The young artist’s poetry (year 1972) plays around with irony, which, nevertheless, is not taking shape as a mere form of formal interpretation of the subject, but becomes a privileged medium for an intellectual revision of those works: Morof’s images preserve the works’ greatness that the artistic historiography conferred them, but at the same time lets them reemerge in a fresh, relaxed and playful way, even when facing themes that are crude and steeped in pathos, as in Beato Angelico’s Cristo con la corona di spine (Christ with a crown of thorns), or in Sebastian del Piombo’s Cristo portacroce (Christ bearing the cross).
There are various comparable procedures that can be found in the panorama of modern and contemporary art: starting with Eugène Bataille’s mockery with his Lisa fumant la pipe (Lisa smoking the pipe) (1883), moving on with an almost fierce sarcasm by Duchamp in his L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) – where the constantly renowned Gioconda is desecrated by the adding of moustache and pointed beard; from the iconographic translation of Man Ray’s Violon d’Ingres (1924), to the semantic puzzle of Peter Schuyff’s most recent works.
Morof offers a subjective view of the works he reproduces where the resuscitation of the art from 1400’- 1500’ painting is mixed with a winking curiosity, cheerfully puerile and yet never irreverent.
The cartoony taste of both the particularity’s productivity , as in the spherical eyes and heart shaped mouths, and of the work’s proportions, reversed with respect to the classic Renaissance canons, carrying out a real “morofication” on these works, triggering an interpretative process that finds its start point in the translation of a stylistic figure and ends up with a alteration of an articulated, expressive language.
In the same way, the scrap between meaningful and significance can be investigated with irony as a tool, in a comparison between the representation of past works and the disenchanted point of view of the contemporary consumer. The search of a renewed ability of personal reworking of the works takes up a close up value especially in the present time , where a superficial observation is the natural consequence of the everyday “mediatico” overload. The modification of the original titles strengthens the new meaning Morof attributes to the images:figurative in that way is ‘Not all have the same cross?’ (o ‘Not everyone has the same cross?’), new edition of Antonello da Messina’s ‘Crocifissione’ (‘Crucifixion’).
This new cycle of works, realized for Cologne’s Bloom exhibition, his works were presented in a stand turned for the occasion into a museum hall adorned with frames, television cameras, extinguisher and a chair for the guardian drawn directly on the walls in a… Morof style!
Valeria De Simoni
Carola Blondet and Emily Bartlett. (editors)
The young artist’s poetry (year 1972) plays around with irony, which, nevertheless, is not taking shape as a mere form of formal interpretation of the subject, but becomes a privileged medium for an intellectual revision of those works: Morof’s images preserve the works’ greatness that the artistic historiography conferred them, but at the same time lets them reemerge in a fresh, relaxed and playful way, even when facing themes that are crude and steeped in pathos, as in Beato Angelico’s Cristo con la corona di spine (Christ with a crown of thorns), or in Sebastian del Piombo’s Cristo portacroce (Christ bearing the cross).
There are various comparable procedures that can be found in the panorama of modern and contemporary art: starting with Eugène Bataille’s mockery with his Lisa fumant la pipe (Lisa smoking the pipe) (1883), moving on with an almost fierce sarcasm by Duchamp in his L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) – where the constantly renowned Gioconda is desecrated by the adding of moustache and pointed beard; from the iconographic translation of Man Ray’s Violon d’Ingres (1924), to the semantic puzzle of Peter Schuyff’s most recent works.
Morof offers a subjective view of the works he reproduces where the resuscitation of the art from 1400’- 1500’ painting is mixed with a winking curiosity, cheerfully puerile and yet never irreverent.
The cartoony taste of both the particularity’s productivity , as in the spherical eyes and heart shaped mouths, and of the work’s proportions, reversed with respect to the classic Renaissance canons, carrying out a real “morofication” on these works, triggering an interpretative process that finds its start point in the translation of a stylistic figure and ends up with a alteration of an articulated, expressive language.
In the same way, the scrap between meaningful and significance can be investigated with irony as a tool, in a comparison between the representation of past works and the disenchanted point of view of the contemporary consumer. The search of a renewed ability of personal reworking of the works takes up a close up value especially in the present time , where a superficial observation is the natural consequence of the everyday “mediatico” overload. The modification of the original titles strengthens the new meaning Morof attributes to the images:figurative in that way is ‘Not all have the same cross?’ (o ‘Not everyone has the same cross?’), new edition of Antonello da Messina’s ‘Crocifissione’ (‘Crucifixion’).
This new cycle of works, realized for Cologne’s Bloom exhibition, his works were presented in a stand turned for the occasion into a museum hall adorned with frames, television cameras, extinguisher and a chair for the guardian drawn directly on the walls in a… Morof style!
Valeria De Simoni
Carola Blondet and Emily Bartlett. (editors)
