Marco Bruzzone, Underwater Signs, installation view.

“Marco Bruzzone's works function as an “underwater protest”, raising awareness of worldwide anthropogenic activities that lead to increasing pressure on marine ecosystems.”

Marco Bruzzone, Underwater Signs, installation view.

Marco Bruzzone, Underwater Signs, installation view.

Excerpt from the exhibition text by Dieter Roelstraete:

Marco Bruzzone’s recent paintings are the result of a series of “underwater protests” staged in the maritime depths around Bergen, among other places. They resemble sign paintings squarely planted in the long tradition of protest art, but also allude to the comparably long history of marine iconography in painting – a world of mystery as much as knowing. (In a conversation about these works, the artist enthusiastically told me that according to fairly unified scientific opinion, only five percent of the world’s oceans have been properly explored and charted to date.)

Above all, however, they offer, quite literally, a muted glimpse of the future – or of what much of today’s art might look like in the not-too-distant future: part of a “waterworld”. (The much-maligned Kevin Costner action blockbuster of that name – set in a post-apocalyptic world of endless oceanic expanses following the complete melting of the polar ice caps – hasn’t aged quite as badly as we think.)

The sea has historically long been the place where we have made things disappear – where we send someone or something to “sleep with the fishes” – but it is also increasingly our destiny, and the submersion of everything we hold dear in it an unavoidable fate, which is precisely what Bruzzone is so keen on depicting. “Sink or swim”: this much must also be true of art.

Click here to read the entire text.