MARSHALL VERNET – A ROAM THROUGH ROME

Among the open skies and the worn out streets, it is possible to feel the strength, and delicacy, the taste of beauty, the elegance of an almost mythological Europe, the classic harmony of the buildings and the electrifying anxiety of nature. Marshall Vernet does not need to portray the remotest places on Earth, or the wildest landscapes that dwarf people’s fragilities. His photos indeed remind us of something important: “landscapes” are everything around us. “Landscapes” are the walls which we live within, the stairs we climb, the fields we hike down, the seas we swim

in. Most importantly, his photos are about the emotions that come from meeting other things. Through his feelings that tell him what to capture and when to capture it, the spectator reconciles himself with the world.

Passionate of classical French and Italian movies, Marshall Vernet recalls the tragic but yet elegant atmospheres of the movies of Fellini, De Sica. There is something disarming in Marshall Vernet’s photographs. They are melancholy, poignant, but also sublime and glorious. That something is a weight: the weight of time and the weight of history. The weight of social interactions that inhabit spaces, and the weight of human constructions, that defy time and yearn for eternity.

It is the light that emphasizes forms and makes them theatrical, as sharp as Caravaggio’s. As it defines the chiaroscuro and refines the picture’s contents, the lighting transforms the photographs in footsteps of an everlasting history. The final effect is the one like the captions of a slow-motion movie. Marshall Vernet therefore, who was first trained as a location-scouter for the filmmaker Tony Scott, is much more than just a photographer: he is a filmmaker by himself, ‘able to narrate the greatness of our continent with elegance’.

His photographs, printed on cotton paper, are touching proofs of humanity that constantly and fiercely confronts itself between life and nature. In doing so, it preserves thoroughly what can be called ‘the dignity of beauty’, that is, everything that is not afraid to fade.

The 42 artworks displayed at the Galleria Francesca Antonacci Damiano Lapiccirella in Rome (www.al-fineart.com) for the exhibition A Roam through Rome fully show the power of Marshall Vernet’s sensitivity.

The Eternal City’s grandeur perfectly matches the photographer’s rich use of grey tones and the theatricality of chiaroscuro, both of them being Vernet’s distinctive characteristics.

Through these pictures, Marshal Vernet does not only record the lure of a city of millennial culture, but he also seems to gently take care of its ruins, of its past, of what is left of its fading eternity.

The modern and the old cleverly speak to each other, transforming each specific into a wider thought over history, the love for the world we live in, and the melancholy of time that consumes it.

Marshall Vernet was born in New York City in 1956. He attended both the Lycée Français de New York and the Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland, where his passion for photography began. Having moved to Los Angeles, Vernet became a commercial director, after having worked with Tony Scott on films such as “Déjà Vu”, “The Fan” “Enemy of the State” and “Domino”. Marshall Vernet is exhibiting at the MIA fair for the third time. His most recent collection of photographs is entitled “Urbis et Natura” and has been shown for the first time at the MIA fair 2017 in Milan. Marshall Vernet is exhibiting for the first time at the Galleria Francesca Antonacci Damiano Lapiccirella, in Rome, with the exhibition A Roam through Rome. Marshall Vernet now lives and works between Los Angeles, Milan and Paris

Mattia Filippo Baldassarra