‘ A Bout de Souffle’: Simultaneous Pulsations and Reminiscences of killer fog

Examining at a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fiction and reality, the way popular media and fact commingle and influence the way we experience events, Mario Rossi’s work operates within the expanded field of painting. He often combines serial representations and objects sometimes as installations and sometimes as interventions.

The End/Untitled (100 paintings) recently purchased by the Arts council, was conceived on a large scale and engaged the viewer directly with recollection and memory, while forcing painting to take a position in relation to the excesses of cinema, culture’s dominant art form. Earlier this year responding to the site of the Metropole Galleries, once a grand Victorian Hotel overlooking the English Channel, Killing Time reconstructed the tragic story of 58 Chinese stowaways who died aboard the ‘European Gateway’ ferry during a channel crossing, while the driver of the lorry went off to watch films. Painting directly onto used fruit and vegetable boxes, displayed to evoke a dockside aesthetic, the work engaged both context and global systems relating to control and distribution.

Collectively titled, A Bout de Souffle uses the space opened up by the anxiety induced by reduced visibility and disorientation. The work takes eyewitness accounts of real events as a starting point to develop a series of paintings that spin a web of connections between the lived, recollected and imagined.

Biography

Recent One Person exhibitions:
Killing Time Metropole Galleries. Folkestone, 2002
The End/ Untitled Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2000
De La Warr Pavilion Bexhill on Sea
AKA London, 2001

Recent Group shows :
Words From The Arts Council Collection, National Touring Exhibition 2002
The Most Dangerous Game, Rhodes +Mann, London, 2002
Fluent Camberwell College of Art, London, 2002
Times of our Lives, Whitworth Gallery Manchester, 2000

Recent Publications:
The End; Cinematic Decay, Architectural Dissolution; ghettos, monsters and the Neo – Baroque, Collaboration with Ralph Rugoff. Published by E.T.A. 2001.
Host, CD ROM, Published by Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, 2002

Curatorial Projects:
Host exhibition, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery 2001, included the work of 20 artists dispersed throughout the museum exploring and revitalising the museums extant collection. Currently co-curating Strangers to Ourselves a national touring exhibition exploring issues of immigration and asylum scheduled for September 2003