Mauro Mercenaro Biography
Mauro Marcenaro (aka Bob Desnos) was born in 1961 in Genoa, the city where he lives and works. He interrupted his university studies in the third year to undertake research aimed at understanding man from within. Thus began his journey as an artist, in which, while pursuing distinctly contemporary issues, he always makes use of the techniques and means that the tradition of painting has consecrated over the centuries: the use of materials such as Bologna plaster, shellac, powdered pigments, is aimed at keeping the language of ancient art alive in the present. From 1987 to 1995, he assisted Claudio Costa in the development of the art-therapy atelier at the former Quarto Psychiatric Hospital, an experience from which the Institute for Unaware Matters and Forms would subsequently start. It is in this context that his first canvases of strength were born: free canvases similar to fleeces, to prehistoric carpets, memories of a past preserved in the ancestral memory of humanity. The interest in digital and technological language is already evident in his first solo exhibition, in 1994: his research is enriched through the use of electronic sound and 3D animation. Along this line, in the following years, he will develop audio-environmental installations: painting-sound-video during some collective exhibitions of international scope. Painting and technology is also the topic of some lessons that the artist was invited to hold in Milan, at the Accademia Brera, by Prof. Andrea B. Del Guercio, in autumn 2000. He directed two short films which entered the final selection of national competitions and participated in the Genova Film Festival in 2002 with the short film entitled Argonautiicità, which proposes the theme of the mythical and historical journey as a means of codifying the present and a metaphor for his research. For twenty years he has been in contact with artists from Central and Eastern Europe, developing with them a project on the languages of art. In October 2004 this collaboration led him to participate in an exhibition in Tbilisi, Georgia, together with a group of European, Caucasian and American artists. In 2005 there was a large solo exhibition presented by Maurizio Sciaccaluga in Genoa, at the Loggia della Mercanzia. In 2011 he was present with a multimedia installation in the Ligurian section of the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, set up in the Palazzo della Meridiana. In 2013 he held another important exhibition in the Santa Caterina Complex in Finalborgo. In 2015 he participated in the ART Nourishment and Conservation of Art project curated by Andrea B. Del Guercio in the Venetian headquarters of Sant'Andrea della Zirada. In Genoa Marcenaro founded the rebis-labs Association in 2002, located in the heart of the historic center of Genoa. Within this atelier he carries out an active project of anthropological art and research into individual mythologies.
