Surreal on Canvas - Metaphysical

This work belongs to Marchetti's mature surreal-metaphysical phase, the one in which the artist ceases to illustrate and constructs psychic landscapes: environments that do not exist in the visible world but which describe with precision inner states, conditions of being, unresolved tensions between irreconcilable planes of reality. Compared to the related canvases of the cycle, this one introduces a more complex and openly self-reflexive device: the painting within the painting.
The conceptual fulcrum is precisely this mise en abyme. On the front wall, within the frame, a painted scene lives: the white figure, reduced to the essential, is turned towards rays of light and is an integral part of the reproduced painting, unlike the red form that rises from below and takes up the artist's customary vocabulary. Here too the body is pared down, but the figure experiences the conflict between the ascending impulse and the gravity of matter; the representation does not remain confined within the frame: the figure emerges from it, steps over the edge, descends onto the floor of the "real" environment. Marchetti thus stages the very birth of the image, the moment in which what is painted claims an autonomous existence. Art does not describe life: it generates it, frees it, lets it walk.
The red figure emerging from the painting carries this ambivalence within itself. The thin, unstable legs, almost incapable of supporting the body, express the fragility of a creature just come into the world, not yet firm in its own form. It is nascent life, but uncertain. Facing it, an ivory figure with bowed head observes the event as if in waiting, and is at once the most dominant and the most enigmatic figure. Very tall, slender, sinuous, with bowed head, it does not emerge from any painting: it stands in the space like an incarnate threshold, a form that neither ascends nor falls but persists suspended in its own laborious verticality. The long shadow it casts on the green of the floor doubles its presence, binding it to the ground even as its line tends upward. It is the same bowed-headed creature that recurs in the sister canvases of the cycle: in the slightly warmer colour of the flesh, aspiration and weight coexist in the same body. At the margin, the small red half-length figure, isolated, functions as an echo of the observation, another stage, another fragment of the same event.
The entire composition is therefore organized as a scale of states of existence: the image painted within the frame, the creature that is born from it unsteady, the figure suspended between earth and light, the marginal fragment. The red ceiling presses from above, the green floor — colour of equilibrium — supports and at the same time separates, the walls close off the horizon. In the lower left, an opening which, judging by the dark and reddish hues, constitutes an evident sign of the unknown (perhaps grim, as is human existence beyond its protected spheres) placed outside that room where the work lives. In this closed space Marchetti does not tell a story: he fixes a condition, that of the form questioning its own passage from represented matter to life, and from life to shadow.

Marchetti's art is not a sterile mirror of reality, but a door towards profound dimensions of the psyche and of transcendence. Here that door is literally a frame from which the figures emerge: the visible datum — a painting, a shadow, a slender body — becomes a pretext for naming what ordinary language cannot reach. It is, in the most rigorous sense of the term, metaphysical painting. (Marco Sofian. Milan, October 2005)