Lot 576: Marco Cianfanelli - Untitled Portrait

Marco Cianfanelli
Untitled Portrait
executed in 1998
burn drawing on kudu hide, in the artist's original frame
67 by 67cm

Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet, Cape Town, Marco Cianfanelli: Atlantis, 7 to 31 October 1998

In one series of small works, Cianfanelli has used a selection of indigenous skins ... They are exceptionally beautiful: sensuous, evocative, visceral; and slightly uncomfortable to engage with.  There is the ambivalence of cruelty or mutilation which seeps into one's understanding of these works.  They are simultaneously uneasy and pleasurable precisely because of their ambivalent visual contradictions.  This is further complicated by the way in which sensory access to the works is obscured.  Cianfanelli employs glass and metal frames which affect one's ability to read the materials as fur/ painting/ photograph. Tracy Murinik in Mark Coetzee. (1998) Marco Cianfanelli: Atlantis, Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet, unpaginated.