The Artist as Mirror - Who's Marco?

For twelve years, I was a canvas before I became a painter. My body moved between New York and Milan as a model, allowing photographers and designers to use my person as their artistic surface. But what they didn't know—what I was discovering—was that I was simultaneously becoming the observer of my own objectification, the analyst of my own transformation into art.

This dual existence—being both subject and object, observed and observer—became the foundation of everything that followed.

With a degree in Clinical and Forensic Psychology and a psychoanalytic orientation, I began to understand what was really happening in those years of being "used" as artistic material. I wasn't just modeling; I was conducting an involuntary field study on the psychology of representation, on how the human form becomes symbol, projection, unconscious canvas for others' desires.

My art emerges from this unique intersection: the clinical precision of psychological investigation meets the raw vulnerability of having been art before creating it. Each piece in my collection operates with almost clinical methodology, designed to stimulate and return to those points of psychic tension that pin us down, that make us—first and foremost—works of art ourselves.

The red line that crosses my works is not decoration but signature—both artistic and psychological. It marks the exact point where symptom meets recognition, where the viewer stops being observer and becomes observed. It's my autograph on your unconscious.

I work primarily in watercolor now, finding in its unpredictability a more cathartic truth than oil's calculated precision. Each piece becomes a figurative Rorschach test—but one with the peculiarity of psychological investigation. The medium itself mirrors the psychoanalytic process: fluid, irreversible, demanding immediate honesty.

I have deliberately stayed away from the politics of the art world, refusing to chase recognition or market positioning. When Vittorio Sgarbi acknowledged my work at the Michelangelo Prize in 2021, I felt commodified rather than celebrated. True art, like true analysis, cannot be rushed or sold—it must be encountered.

My work hangs in the hematology ward of Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital, where it serves its truest purpose: being present for those confronting their own mortality, their own questions about what makes us human. I organize benefit events for ADMO and animal protection associations not as career moves, but because art that doesn't serve healing serves nothing.

Private collectors have found me, but I seek something deeper: a curator who understands that my work is not about creating art objects, but about creating encounters with the self. Someone who recognizes that these pieces are not meant to be merely exhibited, but to be experienced as psychological events.

I am looking for a curator who can inherit this investigation and give it the international platform it deserves—not to make me famous, but to make the work do what it was born to do: look back at those who think they're just looking.

I offer not just paintings, but a complete artistic methodology. I seek not just representation, but intellectual partnership with someone who understands that the highest art is always, inevitably, applied psychology.