Informal Expressionism: Scarselli’s experiment with abstract dynamics

“A remarkable graphic sense is giving new vigor to his general work: each sign lives on its unlimited freedom, occupying the sheet in its way to signify almost the nothingness of exist, vertical gray traces accompanied by circles, parallel planes interrupted by almost figural hieroglyphics, kites, moons, ladders, and heads, figures that hide behind evanescent streaks: but more than the specific meanings, everything implies an urgency of narration like the lyrical sign became word and symbol“.Dino Carlesi, poet and art critic, says. 

Marcello Scarselli was born in Santa Maria a Monte, in the province of Pisa, in 1953. After graduating from the Technical Institute of Pontedera (Pi), he attended drawing and carving courses and then the Engraving course at the Il Bisonte International School of Graphics in Florence, where he met Manuel Ortega, who gave him a passion for engraving techniques such as collography. Scarselli began his artistic career in the Seventies by participating in numerous group exhibitions and intervening in the lively aesthetic debate of that epoch. The meeting, friendship, and cultural exchange with numerous Tuscan artists such as Mario Madiai and the knowledge of internationally renowned artists such as Ennio Calabria and Giancarlo Ossola were decisive for his education. A realistic representation inspired Scarselli’s premature works. Then, his style turned to the idea of the pictorial “Real” found internally through his memory and intuition and expressed via continuous experimentation with avant-garde techniques and contents. As the

Italian critic Giuseppe Cordoni points out, “Much of the criticism has already repeatedly highlighted the ductile complexity and stylistic eclecticism that fuels the synthesis that Scarselli’s language gradually reaches abstract and informal expressionism, sign gestures, and infantile oneirism”.

His career as a painter has consolidated over the years through constant exhibition activity in Italy and abroad (Austria, Belgium, Germany, France, Switzerland, Portugal, Croatia, Japan), with wide-ranging personal anthologies, such as the of Paris at the Maison d’Italie(Cité Universitaire), at the Foire de Nice, invited by the Italian Chamber of Commerce in France. In addition to the visual arts, Scarselli has tried his hand at sculpture, creating the old stone coat of arms of the Fishermen’s Union located in the Del Rosso family’s palace, attested on the historic walls of Bientina (PI) and a bronze bas-relief depicting Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, again for his town for which he also created Il Cencio for the Palio delle Contrade (2002). Among his manufactured goods, we mention some author labels for satisfactory wines from Bolgheri created for the Versilia Wine Art Exhibition, curated by Lodovico Gierut. Between 2010 and 2011, he participated, with a work dedicated to the rock group Baustelle, in the traveling collective exhibition 50 Tuscan Painters for 50 Tuscan Singers, presented in twelve prestigious places in Tuscany. In 2011, he was selected for an international exhibition at the Royal Opera Arcade Pall Mall Gallery in London. In 2012, he created a pictorial work for the Municipality of Pontedera called Homage to Renzo Remorini, located at the La Badia Centre. One of his works is part of the contemporary art gallery of Il Ciocco in Barga (Lucca). His works have also been the subject of settings for advertising photographic sets like the commercial catalog Dream Design(2006) of the Del Tongo/Delta group and the Soggetto-Oggetto Art catalog(2012). They are shown in the Encyclopedia of Italian Art’s catalog, 2011 and 2012 editions. 

In 2012, Scarselli was one of the protagonists of Rita A. Dollmann‘s photographic exhibition The Space and the Artist: the final act of the reportage created in the art studios and set up in the external paths of the Castello Ginori di Querceto in Montecatini Val di Cecina (PI).
In 2013, the large traveling exhibition curated by Giuseppe Cordoni and Filippo Lotti called Humanitas Machinæ (the painted work) with stops at Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, Palazzo Mediceo in Seravezza (LU) and at the Piaggio Museum in Pontedera (PI).

In 2014, during the collective exhibition The Wall – 25 Years Later held at the Federal Republic of Germany’s Embassy in Rome, he donated one of his works in memory of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the same year, his work was published as a cover of Italo Zingoni‘s poems book Strana-Mente Distratta Dalla Vita, and some of his paintings emerged in the volume. In 2016, his monumental sculpture Pinocchio e il Gioco del Cerchio(Pinocchio and the Circle Game) was installed at the San Miniato Basso roundabout (PI). In 2017, he presented the exhibition Oltre la Forma(Beyond The Form) with the Fiordamaro Gallery at the La Torre exhibition space and the Palazzo del Pegaso in Florence, curated by Riccardo Ferrucci. In 2018, he exhibited Symbola at the Simmi Gallery in Rome, curated by Luca Nannipieri, and then, he had an exhibition at Palazzo Dei Priori in Volterra (PI). In the same year, he was invited to Tokyo(Japan), where he exhibited at the Tokiù Plaza with The Noise of Matter and two other exhibitions in Osaka.

In 2019, he exhibited Burattino Senza Fili(Wireless puppet) at the Parco di Pinocchio Collodi Foundation (PT) and the Lu.C.C.A Lounge & Underground, curated by Maurizio Vanni. In the same year, he created Lavoro, Salario, Dignità, Libertà, a monument to the workers of San Miniato who died at work. In 2020, the exhibition of Pinocchio at the Chiesa della Spina in Pisa in collaboration with the Casa d’Arte San Lorenzo and the Mural at the Joan Miró School in Pontedera was commissioned by the Municipality. In 2022, he participated in ArtInsolite – Teatro Del Silenzio in Lajatico, directed by Filippo Lotti and Alberto Bartalini. In 2022, Scaraselli participated in Good Morning Taviani, inspired by the cinema of the Taviani Brothers at Palazzo Pfanner in Lucca, organized by the Lucca Film Festival, and created the bronze sculpture Cecilia, which will be placed in Piazza Mazzini in San Miniato. He participates in various international art fairs and lives and works in Bientina (PI).

“After the studies – Says the critic Nicola Nuti – he gradually felt the need to experiment with abstract dynamics or, at least, structures in which the Figurative system is in contact with the linguistic synthesis of non-traditional forms. The result was a page of deeply lyrical compositions, albeit anything but narrative or descriptive. Scarselli combines the memory of signs and forms with naturalistic horizons, which preserve the emotional imprint of things without denying the images or archetypes that have imprinted them in the collective consciousness. Although the Tuscan artist began his artistic and exhibition journey in the early Seventies, his curiosity and desire to broaden his pictorial lexicon led him to a greater selection of places and opportunities to exhibit his work“.

Numerous personalities from the world of art and culture have written about him such as Salvatore Amodei, Sandra Campaioli, Elena Capone, Dino Carlesi, Renato Civello, Giuseppe Cordoni, Giovanni Faccenda, Riccardo Ferrucci, Catia Giaccherini, Lodovico Gierut, Egidio Innocenti, Filippo Lotti, Mario Meozzi, Nicola Micieli, Roberto Milani, Franco Milone, Catia Monacelli, Nicola Nuti, Bruno Pollacci, Daniela Pronestì, Mario Rocchi, Alessandra Scappini, Giandomenico Semeraro, Alessandro Toppi, Ursula Vetter, Ivan Quaroni, Selenia Fanteria, Pier Francesco Bernacchi, Maurizio Vanni, Luca Nannipieri, Ilario Luperini. Numerous works by him appear in museums and public and private collections, both Italian and foreign.