Diego Marcon

Diego Marcon is one of the most engaging Italian artists of the current generation. For this new incursion into the fabric of the city, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has chosen Milan’s Teatro Gerolamo: a puppet theater famously known as “la piccola Scala,” by virtue of its miniature size and fine architectural details. It was designed in the nineteenth century by Giuseppe Mengoni—the same architect to create the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, where the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi started its nomadic project two decades ago with Elmgreen & Dragset’s disruptive installation Short Cut (2003). Formerly celebrated for the Colla Brothers’ puppet shows, the theater was rediscovered in the 1950s by legendary theater director Paolo Grassi and relaunched in the 1970s by writer Umberto Simonetta. Today Teatro Gerolamo still resonates with the memories of fairy tales and enchanted atmospheres, many of which find an uncanny symmetry in the works of Marcon.

With his films, videos, and installations, Diego Marcon constructs mysterious chamber dramas inhabited by puppets, children, and creatures suspended between human and post-human states. Blending melodrama and special effects, Marcon imagines a new humanity plagued by profound moral doubts and trapped endlessly in distressing and ever-repeating actions. Presented in this miniaturized theater, Marcon’s works spin around like toy dancers in a hypnotic music box, evoking the microworlds of Joseph Cornell, the fantasies of Carlo Collodi and Lewis Carroll, and the so-called “dramolettes” (in Italian, dramoletti) of Thomas Bernhard, from which the exhibition takes its title.

The exhibition opens in the theater’s central hall, where Marcon has installed the digital animation Ludwig (2018). The video portrays a young protagonist singing an aria (performed by a member of the Accademia Teatro alla Scala’s Children’s Voices Choir) as he waits aboard a ship at the mercy of a storm. Lit only by the light of a match and sudden flashes of lightning in the darkness of the hold, the child recites a strange lullaby in which he declares his weariness and his desire to disappear forever. Set against this evocative and dramatic theatrical backdrop, the title and soundtrack of Ludwig conjures the figure of Ludwig II of Bavaria, the so-called Mad King, who devoted his life and finances to building castles and other reckless architectural fantasies, while supporting the dreams of Richard Wagner, for whom he financed the Bayreuth Festival Theater. Declared insane and deposed due to his eccentric behavior and wanton spending, Ludwig died by drowning but has ultimately become synonymous with an existence devoted to art beyond all reason. Portrayed by Luchino Visconti in his eponymous film—and even admired by Walt Disney, who chose Ludwig’s castle as a model for Disneyland—Ludwig II of Bavaria may have nothing in common with the child Marcon depicts, yet the video invokes an atmosphere in which reality and delirium intermingle in a complex and dangerous entanglement worthy of the Mad King’s follies.

Similarly suspended between reality and hallucination, the film Il malatino (The Little Sick Boy) (2017) appears to combine sincerity and simulation, pathos and pretense. In this animated short—presented on the lower floor of the Teatro Gerolamo—a feverish child gasps for breath while lying in bed. The protagonist’s emaciated features are reminiscent of those of characters from Victorian literature; the title, too, evokes works like the classic Italian novel Cuore, steeped in memories of pandemics both recent and distant.

In the balcony spaces, Marcon has installed Untitled (Head falling) (2015), a series of 16mm film projections made by directly etching onto the celluloid pictures of faces and heads that seem to be falling asleep.

In the room at the top of the stairs, Marcon stages the video-drama The Parents’ Room (2021), in which actors wear prostheses modeled on their own likenesses. Made doubly monstrous by the absence of facial expressions, the impassivity of the figures contrasts with the violence of the narrative and the melody of the soundtrack, making this mysterious fragment of Grand Guignol theater feel even more alienating and cruel.

In the adjacent spaces of the library, where the marionettes that used to act in the theater are displayed, Marcon presents a small series of sketches of empty beds which might be alluding to another tragic loss or, more broadly, to the end of childhood.

Seen together, Marcon’s works emerge in a fantastical world inhabited by creatures that seem to exist in between the natural and the artificial. Surrogates, replicants, and more or less artificially intelligent creatures, these characters are new monsters not so unlike the puppets, dolls, golems, Frankensteins, and automatons that have populated the history of literature for centuries. Marcon’s digital puppets, celluloid heads, and latex masks are the new avatars of a post-human species: they are desperately seeking to unearth a trace of truth buried in the mounds of plastic and digital scraps that surround us. In this search, Marcon discovers that humanity hides in the flawed, dark, pathological excesses of evil, and that art perhaps has the thankless task of bending technology toward the vileness of the human.

Marcon’s exhibition at Teatro Gerolamo is part of a series of key projects organized by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, under the chairmanship of Beatrice Trussardi and the artistic direction of Massimiliano Gioni.

Captions

1.
Diego Marcon
Ludwig
2018
Video, CGI animation, colour, sound
Loop of 8’14’’
Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

2.
Diego Marcon
Il Malatino
2017
16mm film, colour, silent
Loop of 23’
Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

3.
Diego Marcon
Untitled 01 (Dolle; Sketch for the Moles’ Bed)
2023
Pencil, ink, and highlighter on paper
210 x 148 mm
Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Diego Marcon
Untitled 02 (Dolle; Sketch for the Moles’ Bed)
2023
Pencil, ink, and highlighter on paper
210 x 148 mm
Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Diego Marcon
Untitled 03 (Dolle; Sketch for the Moles’ Bed)
2023
Pencil, ink, and highlighter on paper
210 x 148 mm
Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

4-5-6.
Diego Marcon
The Parents’ Room
2021
Digital video transferred from 35mm film, CGI animation, colour, sound
Loop of 6’23’’
Courtesy the Artist and Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee, Napoli.
Supported by Italian Council (2019).

7-8.
Diego Marcon
Untitled (Head falling)
2015
16 mm film, fabric ink, permanent ink and scratches on 16 mm clear filmleader, colour, silent
Loop of 10’’ each
Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.