Ettore Ceruti - Milan, 27 March 1976
My friendship with Marchetti and my familiarity with his art depend, in large part, on the curiosity aroused in me by his temperament, generous often to the point of squandering his own work, and at times heedless of "managing himself." In any case, the freedom and variety of means with which he assailed his artistic passion always remained, for me, exceptional and astonishing, with works at once refined and barbaric, candid and impetuous, all resolved with enormous impetus and enthusiasm. In sculpture on copper and iron especially, he seemed to give vent to this first weave of his, genuinely primitive yet fabulous and poetic; and it is not easy to convey the fascination of these great splinterings of iron and copper, of these themes of warriors, and in particular the Don Quixote in full repoussé, made without the aid of a deep and conscious culture, without ever having read Cervantes, and entrusted solely to a world of fables told to him and taken up in steel, yet no less deeply felt and powerful for that, and rendered like a raging sculptural suffocation. On the other hand, it was precisely this impetuous labour of memory and imagination that alerted the artist to the need for a greater figurative legibility, for the search for a far more elegiac and tranquil relationship. When the poetic world came to seem to him inwardly provisional, he came to realise that this provisionality was one and the same with the forms he had accepted more than he had personally conquered them, even if the acceptance had been enthusiastic. From then on there surfaces the problem of a fulfilled inner fingering, of a constantly felt need for spiritual formation, which only through painting could inevitably find the renewal of his whole world as the vital root of his feeling, a direction taken up ever more coherently and with lucid and impassioned faith. I believe one could not better define Marchetti's pictorial work than as a stupendous journey through the infinite worlds of the spirit. He always succeeds in giving us, in a well-balanced and harmonious spatiality, a depth of feeling which, in light tones, warm and vibrant, bent on evoking his subjects within an aura of pure poetry, is expressed lovingly and, we might say, religiously. What strikes one in him is the vigour of ideas that imposes itself upon the senses and clothes the phantoms of imagination in the concrete; evident, too, is the continuous effort to impoverish and pare down the colour, with the sure aim of asserting the construction and the offering of an infinity of feelings and of splendours of beauty, which from the eyes descends into the soul, chastening every temptation of effect and of chromatic excess. His painting is born, therefore, of a travail, of a yearning towards an absolute purity. One must grant the artist, as an act of consistency with the work carried out thus far, that from an initial creative fury, often dramatic in its search for a reality-poetry relationship that might find resolution in his conscience, he may at times even have erred, but he has gone on experimenting with vividness, commitment and sincerity, to the point of giving meaning and dignity to his aesthetic meditation.
Ettore Ceruti - art historian
English translation produced with the aid of artificial intelligence. The authoritative text is the Italian original.