Marco Corsini (b. Wangaratta, Australia, 1969) is a Melbourne based artist and the Founder and Director of Melbourne Art Class. Marco has exhibited in both Australia and Europe. He has been a finalist in several awards including the Rick Amor Drawing Prize. He was the Chief judge for the 2021 Camberwell Art Prize. Marco’s Masters’ thesis was titled, ‘The Subject within the Art Of Gordon Bennett’, studying understandings of identity within the Australian artist’s work. Marco has also run creative workshops for companies such as the Coles group and has been an instructor for Google worldwide.

Marco has described his paintings as a means of “encounter[ing] the world rather than represent[ing] it.” His stated interest in perception, consciousness and the capacity of painting to record experience rather than simply reproduce appearances provides an important key to the work. His paintings are not attempts to establish a definitive image of a place. They are records of a relationship with place: provisional, embodied and subject to the distortions of memory and time.

This places Marco at some distance from the picturesque tradition, in which landscape becomes a framed prospect offered to a spectator. The picturesque depends upon a certain distance: the world is arranged before us as scenery. Marco repeatedly disrupts this model. His compositions can appear to hover between immersion and observation, between a close encounter with the material world and the abstract space of memory. Parts of a landscape emerge with remarkable specificity while others dissolve into passages of paint. A tree may be insistently particular; the space around it may seem to have no stable coordinates. The result is not an imperfect representation of nature but something more interesting: an image of perception itself, caught in the act of trying to make a world coherent.

His shifts in viewpoint and perspective, and the fact that works are sometimes developed over extended periods, mean that the paintings accumulate duration. They do not necessarily represent a single moment. Rather, they seem to contain the residue of multiple moments of attention. Looking becomes a temporal activity. The landscape is encountered, remembered, reconsidered and encountered again.

This gives the paintings an unusual relationship to time. They are neither snapshots nor conventional memories. They are closer to what Henri Bergson called duration: lived time, in which past and present are not cleanly separated but continuously interpenetrate. A place remembered is never simply the place as it was. It is the place as it has become within consciousness.

To paint an Australian landscape today, is never quite as innocent as it once appeared. The tradition carries with it the history of the picturesque, the colonial gaze and the construction of an apparently empty continent as something available to be seen, mapped and possessed. Contemporary Australian landscape painting necessarily exists in the wake of this history. Marco’s work does not resolve this problem through overt political symbolism. Instead, it quietly undermines one of the assumptions on which the traditional landscape genre depends: that the world can be stabilised by looking at it from the outside.

His landscapes resist mastery.

There is no single authoritative viewpoint. The eye is encouraged to move. Spatial relationships become uncertain. Areas of detailed observation give way to loose abstraction, creating what one description of his work aptly calls the sensation of “passing through that which is observed in part but never fully perceived.” The phrase is significant. The incompleteness is not a failure of perception; it is the condition of perception. Painting becomes a way of holding this instability without resolving it.

This may also explain the tension between the heavily worked and the apparently unfinished passages in Marco’s paintings. The surface becomes a record of decisions, revisions and hesitations. The painting does not conceal the process through which an image comes into being. It exposes, instead, the gap between seeing and knowing.

The achievement of the work lies precisely there. Marco does not ask painting to settle the question of what a landscape is. He asks what happens when we remain with it long enough for our certainty about it to begin to dissolve.

The landscape, in these paintings, is not a view. It is an event.

And painting is the trace left by having been there.