Marco Raparelli, HUMAN IS A STATE OF MIND, 2019

One of the most interesting Italian contemporary artists, Marco Raparelli takes us with his drawings to his ironic and edgy world; Human is a State of Mind is a collective portrait of a humanity with bizarre attitudes and mad daily sceneries. A parallel universe crossing the social and the political by presenting situations and sentiments free from rhetorics, between truth and fiction, reason and irony. Raparelli catches defects, manias and contradictions with an imprecise and synthetic graphic style, inspired by the comic book’s tradition, in its black-and-white taste and communicative immediacy. Even the language is apparently free from mediation, raw and direct: a spurious English language with no flag, globalized, bended to the web and the chat, that belongs to everyone and everyone can understand, even when it can’t be fully controlled. Hand drawn and written in its entirety, Human is a State of Mind is a book that traces the boundaries of Raparelli’s poetics, constantly in between the real and the imagined, in which the efficacy and irreverence of images and words, in their simplicity and hardship, escape even from the author’s control.

Marco Raparelli (Rome, 1975) is a visual artist working with video, drawings and installation. He studied at the Fine Art Academy in Rome and at the Loughborough College of Art (UK) and at the Fine Art Academy in Bruxelles. He has exhibited his works at MAXXI in Rome, Museion in Bozen and Castello di Rivoli in Turin, along with many galleries and foundations in Italy and abroad.