Marco Pace

Marco Pace (Lanciano (CH),1977)

As a child, he wandered curiously among his illustrator father’s inks and nibs, he himself had a library full of Urania and L’Eternauta, this is the painter’s imaginative imprinting… covers by Karel Thole and comics by Breccia and Segrelles. He attended the G. Palizzi Art Institute in Lanciano. In 2000 Adriana Martino wrote about Marco Pace in Flash Art as a painter of the new generation of the Bad Painting current, with the same curator he exhibited several times in the project she created New Zone non-profit space. In 1997 Marco Pace moved to Florence to attend Prof. Gustavo Giulietti’s informal painting course. During his years at the academy, he worked on cartoon stories, theatre sets (Teatro Studio in Scandicci), group and solo exhibitions. In 1999, he attended Guido de Maria and Ro Marcenaro’s animation course for a year, after which he worked in the animation studio SEMBO for a few years, at the same time also as a set painter for television dramas directed by Salvatore Samperi. After graduating (2003), he met and immediately started collaborating with Gianni Pettena, since then he has been supervising the realisation of An-architect’s installations (Manifesta7, Athens Biennial, FIAC, Artissima, PAC, UMOCA Salt Lake City, Pompidou, Crac Occitanie, Frac Orleans, private galleries etc.). Marco Pace continues his artistic career mainly as a painter, holding solo and group exhibitions for the most important Italian curators and galleries. Since 2021 he has been drawing for the writer Alessandro Gori (Lo Sgargabonzi) ‘L’età dei Mortali’, a Graphic Novel project still in progress.

[…] The world of Marco Pace is a world that I also pass through and that I note with other instruments, but it is that he preserves within himself a manner so primordial (and that he continually asks himself how and why being here, today) and loving, that the nature that he knows, researches and traverses, and that he loves, changes every time, and prevails, is gigantic, immense, splendid and inexorable… Architecture sometimes confronts, suffers its scale and vastness, and loses the challenge… […] Gianni Pettena

[…] The inhabitants of Marco Pace’s images are always figures of non-belonging, of dislocation, of exclusion. Rejected to the margins by civil society and cultures they find themselves inhabiting that inadequate and out-of-scale space that Pace’s images shape as a temporary protective niche and, at the same time, incompatible, contradictory. […] Marco Scotini

[…] I do not have the means to conduct my reflection, carefully, towards the work of Marco Pace. As, for that matter, in his life.

I sensed something of Pace in a bar-restaurant last summer where he, I, his sister and a friend of his sister’s had a friend, when we accidentally discovered that on the wall there were some drawings of his, from his youth, telling the story of pizza. Before those drawings I had like an epiphany. I have seldom experienced this feeling, in front of Raphael’s Transfiguration in the Vatican Museums, in front of Titian’s Assumption in the Frari, or in front of those artists, rare for me, where I recognise an immense talent, an unreasonable vocation. His drawn and colourful pizzas filled a large wall, all framed, they were probably prints, according to him, of a youthful commission, they sounded like the first notes, clean, simple and transparent of the child Mozart. That day he stretched out his hand to help me up onto the rock as I struggled elderly out of the sea where I had soaked for the first second swim of the season. He always lends a hand, to anyone, whether someone is in difficulty or not. That gesture and that generous hand for me was confirmation that the hand, from Haidegger, to the trembling hands of Salvo Monica, in the hands, thus led to the mind, whether form of grace or misfortune, are paws that know how to dig, form burrows, or form pizzas that, like Wharol’s Marilyn, know how to reach and join everything. Of Peace then I have, or can only have, a hallucination.[…] Francesco Lauretta