Mario Schifano

«[…] And so, we must say to those for whom Schifano is a kind of naïf prophet of the mass media or new technologies only because he photographed a television screen and then painted it, that no, his greatest interactivity with media was with a brush and canvas, and that this was not a conceptual or, even worse, an ideological choice: it was “human”, and that was enough. The paintings’ intrinsic “humanity”, which Schifano accepted with great spontaneity and then transplanted into his paintings, today risks being misinterpreted in the controversy between the apocalyptic and the assimilated sides of art, about its lawfulness, its value, its new millennium…

“What do you want from me? I am only a painter” Schifano would probably have said, hiding himself behind a kind of behavioural understatement that deep down hid a single, great certainty, among the thousand uncertainties of his character: the certainty of not having to search but to have found, according to Picasso’s famous aphorism. It is this that is common to such great “producers” of art as Picasso, Fontana, Warhol, and Schifano too: they have found».
Marco Meneguzzo, L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità umana. Arte e media in Schifano,
in Mario Schifano per esempio, 1998, Edizioni Charta, Milano
See biography