A new series of prints, developed from watercolours whose references are rooted in cinema. but whose influence extends into the high street. The work represents a sustained engagement with image streaming across media and forms.
It’s a front is a series of watercolour sketches of cafes, bars, restaurants which are all named after the title of a film. In the tradition of watercolour as a medium for topographical and landscape painters, of the eighteenth century and as an accepted accomplishment for the educated classes, these sketches offer a journey recording the details of specific sites and places. Originally made en plein air and on location, the images are sourced now from the internet, with watercolour perhaps the most appropriate medium akin to the low-resolution of the digitally-sourced images. Here is a Grand tour of the café fronts, all named after films from across the globe.
Restaurants and bars are often the first sign of an emerging community within a foreign location. The choice of name is often poignant and telling: romantic, pioneering, nostalgic, full of hope. The name conjures up associations in all of us and unites in common experiences, however different or strange the distance between us. It’s a front connects to the idea of diaspora and displacement. The displacement between the chosen name and the reality of the place: the displacement between a film title and the canopy of a café; the displacement perhaps of an emerging community: a displacement with the way cinema allows us to project a sense of who we are or what we might become, or as Julia Kristeva suggests ‘to confront the stranger within us’.
Mario Rossi lives and works in London and Hastings. His work is held in many private and public collections: Arts Council England, The Gallery of Modern Art Edinburgh, Victoria and Albert Museum London, and the Saatchi Gallery London. Recent exhibitions include: Now, Today, Tomorrow and Always, Towner Eastbourne. Fine Art Society Edinburgh, The End (reprise) Canal Projects, London. Knock Knock, Jerwood Gallery, Unspooling: Artists and Cinema, Cornerhouse Manchester.
