(Boston 1913–2000 Parma)
‘L-R-5-57 Terim’, 1957, signed Marca-Relli, titled and signed Marca-Relli on the stretcher, oil, canvas collage on canvas, 138.9 x 170 cm, framed, strip frame, (MCC)

Photo certificate:
The work has been registered by the Archivio Marca-Relli under the archive no. MR 6131/ Copyright Archivio Marca-Relli, Parma.

Provenance:
Luisa Spagnoli – acquired directly from the artist in the 1970s
The heirs
Private Collection, Italy

The monochromatic collages by which most of us came to know Marca-Relli immediately established him as sui generis in this much exploited medium. His collages were different because he eschewed both the textural variations of the Cubist and the “associational” evocations of the Dadaists and Surrealists. The neuter linen patches, identical with the canvas surface on which they were pasted, themselves constituted an hermetic system. They thus seemed to defeat an original intent of collage: the reintegration, in an abstract manner, of elements of the external world. Yet collage gave Marca-Relli’s work special strengths. Beyond simply enhancing the surface, the lamination endowed the picture with a pervasive substantiality, intensifying our sense of it as an object rather than an illusion. The cut edge of linen also had a certain frankness, even awkwardness, that acted as an inherent safeguard against too-facile lyricism.
(…..) Marca-Relli has mastered the additional dimension of color. Used sparingly, color emerges organically and ineluctably from a monochromatic context. These new “ action collages” gain vitality from their labored , scrubbier surfaces and power from the increasing substitution of more angular shapes for his familiar organic forms. Perhaps most of all, we are impressed by robustness of the execution, the more free and spontaneous for Marca-Relli’s greater painterly assurance.
(William Rubin, from Marca-Relli’s exh. cat. at Kootz Gallery, New York , 1959)