You can be hero (not just for one day)

on the occasion of the SUPERLODOLA exhibition at the ART & CO gallery in Parma, December 2018.8.

“PeI knew what I did wasn't all that important. There are people who build bridges and conduct medical research, while I told stories of fictional characters who perform crazy and extraordinary feats, wearing costumes. But I suppose I understand that entertainment cannot be easily ignored.”

(Stan Lee)

In a recent interview Stan Lee defined his creations as entertainment: in recent days there have been many articles and publications that celebrate his genius. What Lee and many other artists have created with him is actually much more than a simple story told through comics or subsequent cinematic transpositions. Those who tell stories create universes parallel to ours, as real and tangible as a building constructed by an architect, a bridge or a road. It is an obviously different type of reality and with a different function, but equally concrete for those who manage to immerse themselves in its values and dynamics. Spiderman is as real as the actor who plays him, indeed he will surely live for longer: even if he dies, a superhero remains immortal, if created and told by the right pen. How to feel emotions through relationships distinguishes us from animals in the same way that literature and art distinguish us from machines, telling fantastic stories and conveying essential messages through the characters is an arduous and difficult undertaking, which succeeds those few artists who, together with inspiration and to the imagination, in addition to talent, they manage to combine lightness and spontaneity of thought, pleasure and passion of the story.o.

For this an artist like Marco Lodola he could only be the spokesperson through his works of a message of this magnitude. Its light but far from simple style is in fact perfectly suited to celebrate the figures of Superheroes. The sculptures that animate our exhibition reveal the Pop side of the Superheroes, their light and spontaneous soul, bringing them closer to us.

From Wonder Woman to Hulk, from Batman to Spiderman, the superheroes invite Lodola into their world, entrusting each sculpture with a story to tell and on the other hand his own art is projected in an exhibition that wants to celebrate his inspiration and the immense talent.

The most important message we want to leave with this exhibition is that each of us is a hero, and not just for one day. There are many studies in which it is highlighted how superheroes and the values they bring are closely linked to the historical moment in which they are created or which they face. So we are Peter Parker, when we wear the Spiderman mask and he tells us that everyone has their own super power, different and unique.

Each of us is a hero, not just for a day.

(Alice Pezzali)

You know: a "post", a "neo", a "hyper", a "meta", a "trans", a "super", a "pulp", today no longer are denied to anyone. As once the Tuscan cigar and the knight's cross. What is television? It is post-television, answer today's Thinkers. What is eroticism It is neo-eroticism. What is literature Is meta-literature, What is reality Is hyperreality, What is a banana Simple: a trans-banana. And so on, with prefixes that attack everything but mean nothing. So, contemporary art is an amazing nothing "Oh, the Nothing is too much!", Baltasar Gracian wished, perhaps foreseeing the universal becoming of the Internet. You do not love Nothing It is your art-riosclerosis problem., Contemporary art, as we know, is not a concrete, graspable entity: its territory is not defined by a meaning that sets its boundaries, it has a its complex friability that blurs its contours. And then, in a world where nothing is true and everything is plausible, it is necessary to treat evil with evil, virtue with the virtual, beauty with rubbish, with a sigh of lightness. That's what Marco Lodola does. Its "hallmark" is plastic. This anonymous and repulsive high molecular weight organic substance, a miserable by-product of petroleum, rubbish for less well-off lovers of bad taste, and the artistic "body" of Lodola. With its cold and detached presence - a material so flexible and light as to become almost "immaterial", plastic erases all psychological depth and the artist's works become a celebration of the surface ... It is no coincidence that plastic guarantees the reproduction of everything ( from the Swatch watch up), but also the celebration of the object, But the situation is now reversed; now it is the object that chases the subject; it is the copy that drives out the original; it is the reproduction of the fact that prevails over the fact. An inversion of roles, therefore: matter is the end, man the means. In the artist's works there is the man-silhouette, a regression to the infantile stage of a figurine, which becomes a shadow of himself, the production of what he produces, an object made in series. Ultimately, the individual repeated in mass-man, in multiplied man, carried by the system into a condition of plasticized existence. The flesh, opacified by the wear and tear of modern life, is replaced by enameled neon perspex, whose smooth and transparent materiality no longer entails existential anguish but the achievement of a state of indifference that becomes the point of view through which Lodola looks at the world.l mondo…

 (Roberto D'Agostino)

 Marco Lodola has failed his mission in life. Before he was born he had set out to become a great musician, with many boys who would vibrate on the waves of his music. Instead he must be content with being an artist who has created only his own unique style. Oh, he tried to get up on stage to perform. I also had to host it at Help, as an "emerging group"! Omar Pedrini of Timoria had recommended it to me: "It's extraordinary!" - Who, Lodola as a musician "No, the fact that a great artist gets involved!" Luckily, Lodola a Help later came to us as an artist. And also at the Roxy Bar. In the scenography there are three of his works, beautiful in all their bright colors. I have always loved mixing music with other artistic forms. It all started with Jovanotti, who painted a trumpet to sell to collect some pennies to send to African children in a Galeata boarding school, we made almost six million. Since then I have asked many singers and musicians to paint: Marina Rei, Max Gazzè, Edoardo Bennato, Ivan Cattaneo, Paola Turci, Andy, Elisa, Skunk Anansie, Reggae National Tickets, Alisha's Attic and Omar Pedrini. The latter, however, does not know how to paint and so he brought me Marco Lodola, his extension in the world of art. Without realizing that he has become Marco's projection in the world of rock. Lodola creates Timoria album covers or sets for 883 because he really believes he is working for his own album or for the tour that is about to start. Someone should make him understand that he must continue on what has become his path and let go of dreams of rock glory. But perhaps it is better to leave him in this great illusion that pushes him to make works that have the lights and colors of rockock…

 (Red Ronnie)

 …Take a sensitive baby, shake it for three months, then make it grow suddenly and let it rest for a long time. Now pull it without breaking it up to one meter and eighty for about seventy-five kilos. Put on a pair of patterned boxers, a sweater bought on the Internet in memory of the ones his mother ordered from Postal Market, put on a black duvet down to the ground, a black rapper hat in black wool dropped on a black optical frame, Elvis Costello style and walk him in a very cold and foggy city. Take him to the movies to see Buster Keaton, Fred Astaire and John Belushi. Read him Mickey Mouse and "Gulliver's Travels", Gregory Corso and Scott Fitzgerald, Give him talent and fear, lightning and sleepiness. Grizzolate his hair, give him a black smock, two shop boys and lock him up in a 600 square meter studio-former factory-loft with make-up for a playground from 6 to 14 years old, (see "cité des enfants" - Museum of the Villette - Paris ): table football, toy soldiers, drums, bedroom gym, carpets, sofa bed, armchairs, television, electric guitars, punching ball, coke, bar with spirits (only for friends and unaccompanied friends), tables, sheets, pencils, brushes, acrylics, plexiglas, neon lights and power sockets. Give it ultramarine blue and shocking pink. Give him erotic raptus, music, dancers and leave him alone. At this point, give him a beautiful young and sensual wife, gifted with brains and a sense of humor, a daughter identical to him not yet shaken and a dog from a noble family whom he will call Blu. Give him works, audiences, critics and catalogs. Give him success and give him the limits. Give him overseas exhibits and fear of flying. Give him a Tavor. Hold his hand. Give him many friends and some brothers. Get him on a concert stage but don't let him sing. Have him recite a poem and open all the vowels to him. Walk among his works lit like among the boulevards of a city that you remember without ever having been there. Turn them off if you want to understand the difference between "on" and "off", "in" and "out" (which is always Yin and Yang anyway). Sleep peacefully in his playground, but bring plenty of blankets because the heating remote control is capricious and as indomitable as an artist. And finally give it a name, a simple, musical, almost feminine name: Marcolodola starts from the lips and then the tongue beats three times on the palate. Yes, Marcolodola is fine. And now call him and visit him whenever you feel like it. Where In Lodolandia, of course. Where else do you want a guy like that to live? …

(Giuseppe Cederna)

  For an artistic encounter, every tip of the world can be fine. It can be a Parisian café - in the best tradition of the avant-garde - or a country bowler: it can be the home of a common lover, an elevator, a casual push in the street, even an insult. There is no need for particular spaces, for rare atmospheres. Hazard, destiny, karma, call it what you want, draw our lines and the most bizarre intersections. For us - for Marco Lodola and Marco Lodoli - the name was the meeting place. For at least two centuries, the theme of the double has stimulated and worried the human mind. Our strangled identity has been wavering for a long time, and the Cartesian theorem no longer satisfies us; I think, it is true, but someone thinks together with me - I am, it is true, but everything and together with me. Feelings and reflections no longer guarantee that we are a nail solidly planted in a precise point of time and space: we feel, we reflect, but in a loose territory, in a sphere that is often chaotic and sometimes miraculously harmonious. "Here lies a man whose name was written in the water," reads Shelley's grave, and nothing else. So not even the name identifies us that much, unless we want to believe that we are really and only those four lines on the identity card. So it was a reason for joy to know that a happy artist was working in northern Italy - as happy as one can be today - who somehow mysteriously corresponded to me and enlarged me. I wrote rather bitter pages, certainly sincere, but perhaps incomplete in their obstinate desolation. I felt I also possessed happiness, but I couldn't turn the medal, I was fixed on the same hard profile. Then I met Marco Lodola and something was unlocked. In him - in me, everywhere - I saw the dance and the color, the trust. This is also why "I fannulloni" was born and the cover of that ugly and melancholy libretto was a wonderful gift from Marco Lodola. Then another fable came out ("Crampi") and again on the cover there was a beautiful picture painted by Marco. And this year the trilogy will be completed with "Great invalid circus". The medal rotates fast in the air: head, cross, light, shadow, no one knows, and a suspended whisk, a pinwheel that does not want to fix itself, that refreshes.

(Marco Lodoli)

  I have a rocking horse from Lodola. He gave it to my daughter when she was born, A rocking horse full of neon and colored faces that if you plug in everything lights up like a carnival sign. The idea that my Teresina plays with a work of art is amazing. I don't know if I understand myself, I too had such luck as a child, I was born in the center of Rome and I played hide and seek among Bernini's columns in St. Peter's and I made small sculptures instead of posing with the soft wax of the candlesticks of the basilica. My friend Marco Lodola designs and manufactures expensive toys, which are useless, but which illuminate, and it is no small thing. They light up a room, a square, a street, the hall of a museum. What a work of art should do if not illuminate I leave it to the critics who have studied to go into detail, I always like to listen to what they have to say, but unfortunately more often than not I soon forget and go back to playing hide and seek unaware of be among Bernini's columns. We know that when you enter a room with a large work of art it sheds light, sometimes so strong that it makes what is around disappear, and it is precisely the effect that art makes, it sheds light, illuminates spaces and receives light from the eyes of the beholder. Lodola is poised between art and the shop sign between the monument and the toy for babies, the rattle to make babies fall asleep and the lighthouse for old sailors adrift. But then excuse me but to me the word art has a strange effect in my mouth, like a tie tight around a neck almost like a noose. It's one of those words that you need a driver's license to say it and I don't even have a pink slip. Let's say that I like Lodola and I hope that he will become the greatest artist of the new millennium, not so much because we have his own illuminated horse in the family but precisely because his is stuff that embellishes, that illuminates, and that goes very well with the beautiful faces and with real environments. Let me explain. In a shabby environment, a Lodola sculpture looks like the sign of something, a piece of modern art, in short, since it tends to illuminate what is around it, it has the power to highlight certain ugliness while for example in a lawn or in a beautiful square with human proportions a piece of Lodola makes it all the more sensibleo…

(Lorenzo Jovanotti)

 …Lodola has recovered, or perhaps found on his own the pleasure of an almost involuntary, not ostentatious quotationism, without any interest in appearing cultured and superb, in this so different from the post-modern Mendini to which it could also resemble. Lodola only thinks of showing, of illustrating, that is his task, whether he collaborates with writers or with big industries, with pop musicians or with advertisers. And what he makes us see most frequently are the myths of the collective unconscious in the mass media era, music, cinema, without idealizing them, but rather treating them in an amused and amusing way, as long as everything is always given as a game. In the end, what counts is the pleasure of the effect, the immediacy of communication, the taste of an image, a style, an object immediately recognizable in their fundamental components, such as an initial, an icon, a "logo. ", without other unnecessary complications. Abbreviations, icons, logos that come to live in the unconscious and to live with those same myths from which they came, blending with them in a continuous mechanism of reflecting mirrors. Floating, staying on the surface without being superficial, this is the great venture of Lodola's art; because pleasure is something quick and evanescent, it exists only if we don't dig into our complications, our intricate psychologies, our eternal dissatisfactions. This is also Lodola's "popularity", an anti-intellectualistic vocation to address the same audience to which cinema, television, advertising, rock star music, to adapt the times and ways of art to those of life Contemporary. Lodola's works could be seen moving in a car along an urban stretch, outside the windows, or along the path of a subway: one can be sure that something of them would certainly remain in our eyes and in our mind. How many other artists could the same be saido?

(Vittorio Sgarbi)

 The most striking aspect in Marco Lodola's art is the singular way in which the light, the colors, the shapes of his works recall the daily experience and the images that accompany us every day in the metropolises in which we live.

That of Lodola is an art for everyone, which everyone is able to understand and appreciate, because it represents everyday life. His faceless characters, his spots of color and his figures without details, are symbolic representations, modern eidos that allude to the multiple and diversified aspects of reality that imposes itself in its immediacy through the simplicity of the stylized forms. And on the other hand, the idea is ultimately - also in an etymological sense - "form, figure, model", something offered to the eye, schematic and visible representation. Lodola's sculptures are comparable to ideas such as intelligible and visible forms of reality, of a reality that can be perceived with the mind's eye, but also with the vision of its lights and colors. The world that is represented is an active world and at the same time full of joy, dynamic, pleasant and festive, made of light and spectacle, of color and vivacity.

The dancing angels, the velocipedes and the horses, the acrobats, the dancers and the sportsmen, thanks to the perspex and the acrylic color used by the artist, are images and materials of a modern, multifaceted world, in continuous movement. The light that passes through the colors, as in the urban advertising of modern metropolises, as in the luminous signs of the show, accentuates these effects and increases the appeal for the attention of the spectator / observer. The brilliance of the composition fills the whole work with liveliness, makes it a luminous reference point that pierces the darkness, defeats anguish, represents the music, the show, the art of our daily life, the rhythm and the color of contemporary life.

Between pop-art and advertising representation, between cinema - which needs light to cross the transparency of the film - comics, among the most recent artistic forms inspired by new technologies and the neon lights of a metropolis with a pulsating life, the work di Lodola conveys the image of a reality in motion, an aesthetic message of great clarity, effective because of great simplicity.

A universal message that comes from an art not of an elite, but that refers to the experience of each of us. Objects and techniques of daily use, in a world of entertainment, of art as a means of communication, of aesthetic messages intended for the general public. A "social" art, therefore, which interprets our way of life in a lively way and represents its positive aspects: not the gray of smoke and concrete; but the colors and lights of everyday life.

(Umberto Vattani)