Marchesini's abstraction is expressed through a sensibility that transforms external space into a flow of emotions.
Thought is immediately translated into colour, and the cage of reality explodes into a fabric of brushstrokes that open towards the infinite. The painting becomes a current of energy that dematerialises physical and spatial references.
The work purifies itself in the absence of weight and substance, reaching an equivalence between rhythm and pictorial sign.

Roberto Marchesini is not only a painter but also a musician. In his performances he draws inspiration from musique concrète. "I love noise, the primordial echo. I reject the system of genres. I play percussion to probe the unknown. From art I expect astonishment and wonder. Either reality renews itself in creation, or one might as well stand still and not bother too much…"

The frames of the works are in many cases antique. The sturdiness of the support is enhanced, achieving a 'parietal' effect that derives from the way the canvas is treated. The artist uses quartz mixed with glue and plaster. "Antique frames give me the certainty of working on something that has a history. Something lived-in that precedes me and comes back to life through the spell of painting."

Marchesini's poetics coincide with the representation of the infinite. Mixed media and oil painting brush against the wall of the canvas. The viewer is guided by the artist's inner eye, which strips space of its concreteness.
The creative imagination rewrites the perspectival coordinates and translates into the dynamic of colour the rhythm of a primordial life, where emotion is captured in its purest state.

"I paint while listening to my music. It is my rhythm. But my rhythm is connected to the Universe. This fusion into the whole certainly has something to do with the sacred. I know I am alone and yet belong to something greater. Something immense.
Art is what remains of the divine on earth."

His work is the fruit of an immersion in the most secret and hidden source of the individual. But in order to draw from this wellspring, it is essential to possess a refined technique that never loses the thread of creation.
"Art cannot but coincide with a profound mastery of the craft. Between an abstract painter and a musician there is no difference on the level of execution. The painterly gesture must respond to the mind's command with the same swiftness. But for this to happen, the hand must be ready, trained, quick."

It often happens that I write about artists I do not know personally at first, people who gradually become an ever more integral part of my human sphere and professional life, as I deepen my research through the study and analysis of their various artistic expressions. It is an exercise we should all undertake, even outside of our profession, because this approach imposes on us a welcome moment of pause, a suspension that must place us before the artist's work completely free of any prior information, bare before a new world and ready to absorb the energy it inevitably emanates. Such is the case of Roberto Marchesini, a well-rounded and particularly reflective artist — his world is fascinating from the moment we manage to immerse ourselves in it, letting his colours stain our soul.
I like to consider Roberto Marchesini's journey as an expressive path that has arrived at the informal with conviction, wisely allowing itself to be carried along by the emotions of his restless soul. A creative ferment cultivated through an extraordinary sense of expressive freedom and emotional transport, unbound from any restrictive logic.
It is impossible and blasphemous to comment on a work of art, Marcel Duchamp used to say; "only the eyes and a certain state of mind can place us in the right disposition before a canvas, sculpture or engraving," Giovanni Arpino reminded us in 1969 as he tiptoed into writing about Rembrandt. This is the respect we should all have for art and for artists, and it is also the reflective approach that emerges in the contemplation of Marchesini's pictorial language.
Compositions of forms and colours as emotions and sensations, like notes on a staff alternating in shape and distance, creating rhythm and harmony, playing with alternation and contrast — a rhythm that becomes vital, and therefore essential, in the very mystery of life.
Everything unfolds according to a logic of expressive freedom rooted in what the artist has absorbed throughout his life: artistic experiences, inner visions and influences deriving from his Crema origins, from the experience in the shadow of the Larian mountains and the reflections of Lake Como, all the way to the assimilation of Indonesian totems which, little by little, have now dissolved into the artist's colours, becoming unrecognisable and merging with the forms and colours that today animate the painterly "gesture" of Roberto Marchesini.
The study, the attention to form and the experimentation — fruit of the intellectual influence of Alberto Burri and Ennio Morlotti through to Willem De Kooning — have left their mark: teachings that reached the artist's heart through the filter of his particular sensibility, which today emerges in all its expressive force through a new language that allows him to display a substantial and evident artistic maturity.
The codes of artistic language employed by Marchesini are therefore the careful choice of a path of deep inquiry that envelops the philosophical roots of the concepts of existence belonging to every living being endowed with reason — a reflection that concerns anyone particularly drawn to dialogue with their own consciousness. The artist confronts it by letting emotions vibrate through a painting pulsating with pure energy.
One need not be familiar with the philosophical foundations of Kierkegaard, Husserl or Sartre to understand Roberto Marchesini's painting; all that is required is the willingness to let the works act upon us, much as one prepares oneself to listen to a particular kind of music — because perhaps it is precisely in the kinship with the rhythm and harmony of musical notes that the secret of the artist's palette lies hidden.
Marchesini's poetic intensity emerges in his innate inclination to perceive his own reality and reinterpret it through the construction of a pictorial surface as a "cage" of energetic gesture and pulsating expressive vitality, a liberation and expression of a deep and sincere feeling.

Of every thing, what fascinates me, or intrigues me, or draws me in, is always the need to know a "why". And it is strange for someone like me, who is instinctive by nature. That is, one of those people in whom the emotional component overrides reason to the point of becoming a gust, a squall, a door that slams shut. Or that, without a sound, opens. Suddenly.
It is almost always a game of moments.
Much like those alchemies that lead a man and a woman to recognise each other, only to perhaps drift apart and never find each other again; yet there will always resurface in memory a fleeting encounter, in a crowd, on a street; a moment divided, and shared, with someone we may never meet again. Or whom we will never again recognise in quite the same way.
It has happened to everyone. At least once.
Encountering Roberto Marchesini's painting was a matter of moments steeped in that very same feeling.
Had I been a collector, I would probably have bought one — out of instinct, precisely — to escape, as often happens when faced with something that surprises, adding it to my picture gallery, in a drawing room, in the guest room, consigning the painting to its immediate, yet simpler, more superficial value; the aesthetic one. Subduing the instinct. Probably giving up on a "why".
But I was not there to buy a painting.
I was there to photograph them.
And to do so I had to abdicate a "why". Or conversely, I had to penetrate it.
But I sensed from the very start that the need to "know a why" was no longer mine alone.
Now it was something different. More intimate. Something that existed in a time and a space unfolding before me, between me and those canvases stacked one against the other, against a large wall, being shown to me one by one for the very first time.
Violating me.
Or rather. Contaminating me.
Because Roberto Marchesini's paintings were immediate slaps. Or dawn. Or night. Or a strident, sharp note. Or a whisper.
A tide. Stillness. Fever. Virus.
Emotion.
And once again I was seized by that damned instinct that drives one into a mad dash, along a street, at night, alone, until the breath gives out, until slowing down and stopping, until simply being, listening to nothing but one's own breathing; as if in a slow time, in the end, it were the reason for every step, and for its advancing, and for the road, and for all the trees that came rushing towards me, and for a single edge of wall that marks the measure of the run.
Exactly that.
Not another one.
In the same way, inside a new slowness that satisfied my gestures and my gaze, searching for the reason behind an emotion, I began to shoot.
The lens and the light like a scalpel searching for those colours — almost tendons and nerves on the canvas — that appeared to me as survivors of a cut, still steeped in humours, laden with imprints, rooted in something that was both this side and the other side of the painting itself. Never the painting. Beyond. Colours as traces, left to bear witness to a story, a passage, the transience of a time measured in instants that now ask to be gathered. Held. Kept. Instants without a master any longer.
Mixed with the air, the fog, the poplars. And now with my gaze. With my smell. With my skin. Clung to and released by all those who have gazed upon those paintings. Or who will still gaze upon them. Discovering them.
Those instants were mine. Now.
Made of my reds. Of my blacks. Of my ultramarine blues. Of my distant land. Of my middle age. Of my yesterday.
Of a dream. Again.
It was the adhesion and the belonging to an intimate feeling to which those canvases compelled me, without gentleness, holding me inside a dense silence that enveloped the room.
And silenced me.
Opening the casket of my thoughts and offering them to this brief volume, to these colours, was then a necessity. Without a why, this time. Or perhaps already sated, I, with every why. Contaminating these pages with my instants, which live in my verses, in my images, in my voice, letting the word become infected with colours, letting the hues spread between commas and accents. Prolonging caesura. Breaking rhythm.
The same introversion as Roberto's, perhaps. Perhaps very different from his. It does not matter. I know that words and colours will tell their stories, as all stories do, without demanding any why.
Without a boundary.
The barriers are only our own. Those of our resistance. Or of the fear of an emotion that contaminates.

Roberto Marchesini's painting arises from an urgency of mark-making that moves in harmony with a condition of permanent transience. Over forty years of research, the artist has traversed the landscape — rooted in the territories of Lecco and Brianza — before arriving at totemic forms and informal outcomes, never relinquishing the experimentation of matter as a living and generative field. The work thus asserts a strong corporeality, rejecting all fixity in order to become a vehicle of dynamism and migration.

As in Homeric beginnings, the artist measures himself against the act of creation, entrusting himself to a superior originary force. The painting — especially in large formats — takes shape as a field of interior and agonistic forces. Here, feeling coincides with acting, and the painterly gesture becomes an event seized from the flow of totality.

The pathos does not allude to a tragic outcome nor to a terminal testimony, but presents itself as access to the indeterminate: a synonym for an interconnected and simultaneous society, suspended in a continuous transfer of meaning.