Screens, pictures, windows. On the poetics of Marcantonio Lunardi

Abstract

In recent years the work of the Lucchese video artist Marcantonio Lunardi (1968) won several awards at national and international level, also receiving some attention from critics. The complexity of his language, which shows a propensity to combine painting schemes and solutions within filmic antinarrative strategies, lends itself to many levels of interpretation. In this essay we try to understand the poetics of Lunardi by analyzing some of his main and most recent video works, using theoretical tools from visual studies. A first stylistic evaluation provide a place the author’s work within a line of research that extends the operational approach of pictorialism photo to video art. For this purpose, Victor Stoichita’s theories on the framework of the painting are useful. A second way of investigation motivate the author’s technical and formal choices within a broader culturologic perspective, with the use of Lev Manovich’s theories on new media. A third way of reflecting, however, concerns the temporality of the video image, analyzed through the notion of “crystals of time” formulated by Gilles Deleuze.