I hate trees in their mating season, ‘cause that’s the time my nose starts sneezin’.
If I can still see, I can still drink.
Christ is risible.
Here one only weeps.
Survival: to make ends meat.
I miss you but you make me sick.
Even the sea has an end, so why not love?
I can give you my all and take it back whenever I want, dammit.
I’m failing in love with you.
It’s like we’re synonyms pretending to be opposites.
Who knows why mask is “persona” in Latin?
Better unexpected than foreseen.
Nobody smiles anymore even when they say cheese.
Maybe we were righteous in the wrong moment.
Darling, please… don’t forget the soy sauce.
I’d rather be soused than aroused.
Shut up and shout.
I don’t want anyone walking behind me and I don’t want kids.
Fuck-give and fuck-get.
Just screw me. I’ll explain later.

These phrases scrawled on walls are cries of despair, love, invective, desire, dreams, nightmares, without signatures. They reek of life, just like the world of Marcello, who adores the street but observes it from the balcony of art.
Marcello is a metaphysical playmaker. He loves bodies as much as language. The pages of this book are three-dimensional phrases. Martellate is a self-portrait that summarizes – in a poetic, fragmentary way – the obsessions that feed Marcello’s work.
His art is like a spring stretched to the breaking point. The effect is like the crack of dawn at the end of a long night of partying: backwards signs, china tigers in a million pieces, popped balloons, palm trees, yellow melons, visual newspaper clippings, automotive discos.
Though his art seems appears carefree and colorful, it is bloated with melankoly, like a disperato-erotico stomp. It’s like flesh, loved and raped by the society that gave it birth. Constantly seeking an amorous fender-bender.

Marcello gets blindsided by one-hit wonders – meteors like Ninetto Davoli, Donatella Rettore, and Mago Silvan, to whom he dreams of entrusting absurd tasks. His favorite drugs are Pier Paolo Pasolini, Peter Greenaway, Franco Moschino, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Romeo Gigli, Carmelo Bene, Magazzini Criminali, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Pontormo, Lorenzo Lotto, Bronzino, Giorgio de Chirico, Loredana Bertè, Arnold Böcklin, Pippo Delbono, Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Massimo Zamboni, Tonino De Bernardi.
He prefers Cynar to Paul Celan. He is bewitched by superheroes, bitter orange soda, circuses, small-town life, its characters, its TV channels.

Martellate is the result of falling in love every day.
Phrases sculpted on paper with a marker wielded like a hammer, with the same intensity as Salvo on marble or Agnetti on felt. Sculpted like the muscles of his body clad in black skin, remembering Mapplethorpe. Marcello escapes logic to quench the thirst for aesthetic and ecstatic, physical and retinal delight. Imagination has broken open his head.
If this book was a show, it would be a concert in a packed stadium with an empty stage, with the audience singing along by heart, blinded by bordeaux Bic lighters.

The rest is boredom.
Period.

The publication is edited by Flash Art in collaboration with Aspesi. All rights reserved.
MARTELLATE (SCRITTI FIGHI 1990-2019) is available in the Flash Art online store.