US and Canada Report

I don’t like being around people, I don’t like being filmed by cameras. I would like my art to talk about me, about the various moments in which I created my works

Marina Corso was born and raised with art, making her way through the storms of life. Then came an intuition: to paint with everything natural around her, from feathers to carrots. And for some years now, even art critics have noticed her, Vittorio Sgarbi, Paolo Levi, Angelo Crespi.  The world of Marina Corso, artist born and lived in Marano Lagunare (Udine), is made of these and many other things; poetry, for example, a form of expression that she has always put side by side with painting, as befits a well-rounded artist. To her beloved country of origin the artist has dedicated a board game, El ziogo de Maran, a sort of goose game she conceived and created in 2019 thanks to a collection of three hundred and fifty vintage postcards that she proudly keeps.

Conversing with Marina, from the very first lines you realize you are dealing with an uncommon person, an uncovered soul, exposed to the bad weather of the world, but at the same time tenacious, animated, as she confesses, by a strong spiritual drive. “I’m introverted,” she explains, “I don’t like being around people, I don’t like being filmed by cameras. I would like my art to talk about me, about the various moments in which I created my works”. Marina Corso’s paintings are an explosion of colors and sinuous shapes, manifestation of a paradoxical extroversion that lives only through delicate and wise touches of color. Her style is indefinable; someone has approached it to the dreamy images of Chagall or to the essentiality of the naif. But this is only the style, (or rather, the styles, modified over time) of Marina Corso, who explains: “Paolo Levi could not believe that it was possible to paint with the elements of nature in such a definite way”. The art critic Levi discovered Marina Corso in 2018; while already the year before Vittorio Sgarbi selected the painting “Pensiero nascosto” to be destined for his future Museum of Contemporary Art.

Painting has accompanied Marina since childhood: “As a child, my teachers were my parents and grandparents. Then I received my first small prizes, in the fifth grade for a watercolor, and at twelve years old in a drawing contest,” says the artist. In Marano Lagunare, a small town where, despite being in Friuli, a dialect similar to Venetian is spoken, the artist proceeds in life between painting (“I used to paint for my grandchildren”) and many important episodes that mark her in body and soul. Repeated road accidents make it difficult for her to use her hands, while the encounter with a mistaken love throws her into a dark period that she will overcome thanks to the presence of her son. For him, once the sad marriage has been put aside, she finally takes up her pencils again and creates more than 400 drawings for a local collector. The proceeds from the sale of her works will contribute to the maintenance of her beloved child. The meeting with her new partner, who encourages her to continue, leads Marina towards a private and artistic turning point: in 2014 the technique, entirely personal, that the painter defines Primitive Actual was born. Corso explains: “I was in the kitchen, which is also my atelier, since I don’t have a real one, nor would I want one. I was preparing soup and I thought I could paint with what I found in nature. Cut vegetables, for example; but also wood from the sea, feathers lost from chickens, and so on”. Thus begins a new moment in the artistic life of Marina Corso, who, in this period, is thinking of using even the pieces of wax that come out of the bees’ hives, thanks to a local beekeeper who cuts them up and gives them to her. She recently painted the work “Bacchus, Tobacco and Venus,” using wine instead of water to dilute the colors, and exhibited it at a wine fair in the Veneto. “I don’t set limits on the materials I can use,” the artist explains.

The lockdown was especially hard on someone who has long had health problems. And who during those months had to undergo surgery, followed by a risky recovery. “We were locked in the house, but I couldn’t paint as much because I was in pain,” she says. “Sometimes I already feel lucky to be able to make paintings and to have made it this far despite my problems. I think that if I should no longer be able to paint, the Lord will find another way for me to express my creativity,” Marina explains, confessing a deep faith, which, she says, she does not necessarily express by participating in religious rituals.

In these weeks, Marina Corso’s works are on display as part of the exhibition Troisi Poeta Massimo, open at Castel dell’Ovo, in Naples, until September 26, 2021. In October, Corso will exhibit in Ferrara, as part of a group show; while waiting for her solo exhibition that will be set up at Galleria La Loggia in Udine, probably in December 2021.