BEHIND THE COVER - Max Marra You make... I recycle and create
Max Marra, born in 1950, a native of the Calabria region, lives and works between the city and hinterland of Milan and the rest of the world. A multidisciplinary artist, his research focuses on the integration and linguistic contamination of drawing, painting, and sculpture, offering a lengthy, consolidated experimentation activity for analysis.
To date, he has held more than 70 solo exhibitions, participating in national and international reviews; his works have been displayed in private galleries and major public institutions. His polymaterial works and drawings are featured in private collections and museums in both Italy and abroad.
He has collaborated with ItaliaImballaggio for many years, coordinating the artists who, from month to month, “dress” the magazine.
In the words of the artist
Retracing the happy, free, whimsical art of the ready-made from memory, with briefly defined gestures, I used ordinary packing tape to assemble a few unlabelled plastic bottles, thus creating a structure that is an all-around archetype of a modern, artful archaeology.
The pretext of recycling water bottles again generated the happy, pleasant insight that free and poetic play always provides, an unexpected surprise, ready to reveal that life without the poetry of art is an experience devoid of emotion.
This is why – even though we know that Man is not sapiens – we must have a profound love for everyone's life.
Max Marra, June 2025
Reviews
[...] His lengthy, consistent daily efforts have earned the artist Max Marra the esteem and appreciation of many. I am familiar with his artworks spanning over 40 years, and I have no hesitation in defining them as multifaceted, many-sided, often surprising, always fresh, in terms of the variety of techniques and themes, which has given rise to a design and formal pluralism expressed through an artistic language that is not only personal but authentic.
[...] Max Marra is renowned for his intimate, natural vocation for material, producing works in which he has sought to convey his artistic, ethical, social and spiritual thoughts on the human condition from a perspective that wavers between the disdainful and the ministering, yet is never sententious.
Yet, in his cycles, which are a tribute to material – the humble “Scarti”, the harrowing “Pance Ferite”, the poetic “Dune d’Oriente”, the contemplative cycles of “Cosmos”, the gestural “Pacchetti”, the mysticism of “Francesco è Solo”, the bitter condemnation of “Appunti sul Ponte” – we can clearly perceive, albeit buried amid the jute, tar, rope, iron, cloth, wax and charcoal, the use of a carefully selected, guarded colour palette that is the primal, formative, almost auroral imprint of the design from which all Marra's work originates.
This can be seen in the balances of the polymaterial compositions, in the appropriation of spaces, in the very distribution of colours, in the orchestration of signs organised as musical counterpoints, in the dialectic between closed and open spaces, between solids and voids [...]
Domenico Piraina (Globus No. 18/MMXXV)
