Marco Barberio: Sampled Realism

Author: Paola Stranges
@italians_malta
published: 30/05/201631/10/2017

http://www.italianiamalta.com

Marco Barberio is first of all an artist, then an entrepreneur.

Mozgallery

A gallery of his works can be found on Mozgallery. He paints portraits and metropolitan landscapes with the technique he defines as "Sampled realism". Sampled Realism or “Campionato Realism” is a way of translating an abstract idea, a mood of the real world and everyday life, into artistic representation, trying to find a correct balance between science and art. Environments, metropolitan landscapes, architectures, streets and places are just the pretext to block the jolt of an instant, the perfect moment. In the pictorial "shots", urban landscapes are not just sets, but moments of suspension, of loss of reference points. Spatiality as an element of the story is intended as an active agent of a tale. They are the beginnings of stories, the beginnings of a film, still images that narrate episodes within spaces defined by frames

Time is frozen and the tension inert, while the action seems "off screen", in another world. The pictorial rendering is realized, framing the digital age, with the sampling technique. The classic example of sampling is given to us by the world of music: the sound wave of an instrument played live is perceived as a “continuous” signal.

When it is digitally “captured”, a sampling process takes place where, given a certain frequency, the information of that signal is stored. In this way that continuous analog signal of reality becomes a discontinuous digital signal, evidently with gaps. But this new digital signal, which can be stored in some way, is perceived exactly like the real analog one. In the digital age, much of the reality we live in tends to be “sampled” and trapped in electronic devices. Similarly, in Sampled Realism the image is created with a process of color simplification, a "sampling". From this point of view, the colors are not mixed but become spots, curves between which there are no shades.

Just as seen in topography with contour lines, or in tomography where the three-dimensional rendering of the body is given by layered samples. The more or less evident jump between one curve and another hides an omission. If you like, it's a bit of a metaphor for modern digital life. Every day we lose some pieces that we consider unimportant, in any case, a distracted and overall look does not notice this loss. This is why sampled realism: at an overall glance, the paintings seem to seek realism, but with a closer look, we notice all the shortcomings marked by the sharp chromatic contrast between one curve and another.

Unlike hyperrealism which is characterized by the obsessiveness of details, exaggerated in all respects, Sampled Realism stands in antithesis where it tends to deliberately leave out details and intends to lose information. These gaps represent the shortcomings of our life, but at the same time they give us the opportunity to rebuild a new reality reshaped on our knowledge and experience.