Marcelo Guidoli spent more than 20 years as an award-winning graphic designer and art director in New York City before embarking full-time as a visual artist. He had a limited...
Marcelo Guidoli spent more than 20 years as an award-winning graphic designer and art director in New York City before embarking full-time as a visual artist. He had a limited formal art education at Spillimbergo art school at the same time that he studied social communications at Cordoba University. He considers his childhood hobby of stamp collecting the genesis of all his work and cultural learning.
For Guidoli, as a child coming from a small town in a remote, landlocked region of Argentina without access to information, and dealing with illness, stamps were a portal to another world -- a better place, full of images, color, design, culture, and well being. In 1974, a friend of his father’s who had traveled to Germany to see the soccer World Cup sent a postcard. It featured a photograph of a sculpture of an elongated nude male figure. The neck and legs were especially disproportioned. Guidoli had never seen the human figure depicted in such a way before. It made him realize that creativity was a celebration of uniqueness and of personal vision, influenced by context, experiences, and imagination. (In adulthood, he learned the name of the artist -- Wilhelm Lehmbruck, one of the most important German sculptors.) Soon after he was exposed to Spanish, Japanese, and other stamps, seduced by the engraving and reproductions. Series like the Mysteries of the Rosary Paintings (engraved by Jose Luis Sanchez Toda), which feature works by El Greco, Murillo, Velazquez, and Tiepolo, and the Japanese Photogravure National Parks from the 1960s exposed him to masters of painting and beautiful Japanese landscapes. And the glyphs that he saw in Egyptian stamps created a fascination with symbols and icons.
The idea of collecting, art, and nature are a constant in his work: imaginary museums taken over by nature in which context and hierarchy are challenged; land and seascapes generated from imagination rather than observation; and symmetrical drawings created during personal illness to represent life balance, the fragmented self, duality and opposites. He enjoys working on ongoing series, jumping from figuration to abstraction and from drawing to painting to sculpture. He is a serial doodler, and his sketchbooks are a rich source of inspiration.