Marco Crippa
The most beautiful views of the city through the art of Marco Crippa. 1936/2025
Born in Milan in the heart of the Isola district in modest surroundings, he began painting from life on the street in his early twenties. Investigating his relationship with this city is not a simple matter: Marco Crippa has often repeated, “Milan is my model,” but the ways in which he invites us to get to know even its less official and tourist views lead us to assume that it is rather his home, or rather, his studio. Milan is his great workshop, a place that the artist recreates beyond all definition and, above all, free from the prejudices that would have it a gray and foggy city, secretive and square. But what does the city the artist invites us to know look like and consist of? Certainly his subjects are the streets, the squares of the center, the places of finance and fashion, the monuments, but also the alleys of the old city, the dilapidated areas, the railing houses with clothes hanging out, the bins lined up in the courtyards; the Navigli, Brera, Porta Venezia, but also neighborhoods such as Greco, Garibaldi, Bovisa, the stations, the city parks. It is by no means a unique city, but rather a total place: dynamic, hospitable and generous, dreamy, often light and well-ventilated. Marco Crippa has discovered that Milan also tastes of sea and storm, he has discovered that place where Milan stops being Milan to become a larger city, offered to the boundless possibilities of his artist’s palette. Within his work unthinkable colors surface beneath the surface of this city erected on watery and mirror-like asphalts; traversed by rails, cables and pipes as by scratches and snakes that graze, dig and scar. Sheets, bricks, marble, concrete and glass, the materials flake and transmute in the artist’s vision that returns to us an uber-abundant, stormy, ripe city, tasty as seasonal fruit; a city that vibrates, runs, plays and breathes between memories of the past and desires for the future.