Marco Lando
Marco Lando’s work is influenced by his New York theatre background. Combining existential plot lines, dramatic lighting, and surrealist stage design, the otherworldly mise-en-scenes he creates operate on a visceral, symbolic level. Always shot in black-and-white, and manipulated digitally, his imagery explores the human psyche, eschewing the rational and moral world in favor of the unconscious and instinctual. The absence of color lends a forensic quality to the uncanny nature of subject matter, and avoids pushing it into the realm of the sensational.
Hermitic figures occupy dark and moody landscapes that recall the mystical and esoteric realms of Symbolists like Odilon Redon, William Blake, and Arnold Bocklin, along with their surrealist offspring — photographers like Raoul Ubac, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer who manipulated the photographic medium for similar affect.
The post-apocalyptic realm of Alchemy (2016-ongoing) presents deranged aerial scenes of the heavens where architectural images, ancient and new, float amid stormy skies and portentous moons.
These stark black-and-white worlds evoke the loss of symbolic order. From twinkling skyscrapers to cold slabs of stone, these monuments to human progress are mysteriously set adrift in a cold, godless universe. Their fragmented, abstracted, and tilting forms seem to fall and rise in response to gravitational forces beyond their control. Like futuristic landscapes infused with the romantic sublime, the nature they conjure is a wild and fearsome one presided over by the power of the full moon. Moving through space, unmoored by gravity and purpose, they are sci-fi ruins from a defunct planet long ago forgotten.
In “Specter of Belief”, a new project for the City of Ravenna that was exhibited in 2020 at the NiArt Gallery in Ravenna, Lando has adapted the ancient Byzantine tradition of mosaic in photo-based compositions. This series references the renowned 5th and 6th century mosaics of Ravenna, created when the city was the western capital of the Roman empire, and the contemporaneous Tomb of the Julii, with its mosaic depiction of Christ as a pagan sun god. Composed of loosely arranged tiles that simultaneously coalesce and break apart, the crowned figures that emerge evoke emperors and popes. With gaping mouths and apprehensive expressions, these fragmented, dissipating forms loom large amid dark starry skies. These constellations of half-formed, recycled powers from ancient Rome shape-shift their way through space and time, lost and searching. Contemplating the enduring potential of myth, they offer us the specter of belief and the lost promise of tomorrow.
Lando has shown his work at the Studio Psacaropulo Museum in Trieste (Italy), and recently at the Site: Brooklyn Art Gallery and at the Viridian Artists Inc. both in New York City. His project for the city of Ravenna (Italy), was presented at the NiArt Gallery in 2020 and most recently in a personal show in 2021/2022 at the Gobbi Photo Studio Gallery in Urbino (Italy), and in 2022 in NYC at the Viridian Artists Inc. in Chelsea; he won the 2021 “Special Prize” for photography and digital art at the DeSidera Art Festival, was longlisted at the 2021 BBA Photography Prize in Berlin, and was a finalist at the 2016 WAC in Wells, UK.