Marco Cordero relates in a physical and material manner to the written text that he excavates and engraves, revealing its intrinsic form. Books, shattered in the creative act, are idolised as an aesthetic, cultural-historical and divine object. The artist – like the poet Petrarch, who in his ascent to Mount Ventoso recounts having opened St Augustine’s Confessions at a random point and having understood “the futility of human things” – allows himself to be accompanied by fate in identifying maximal phrases or words.
Born in Roccavione (Cuneo), Cordero manifests his intimate bond with these lands, with their high and jagged horizons and strong Occitan traditions, often outlining mountainous, rugged and solemn landscapes. It is difficult to say whether it is the places that shape the language or vice versa, but in the perpetual daily dispute it is more important to penetrate and lose oneself in the search. From the written word to the landscape, a myriad of solicitations seem to bind together, pursuing, with balanced wisdom or with warlike impetus, the search for the pure conceptuality of matter.
In his work, corporeity, the material of which the works are made, is part of the conceptual speculation itself. With an ancestral correspondence Marco Cordero then investigates different materials, such as marble, wood, metals and why not organic materials such as apples, in the utopian aim of arriving at thought.