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MARK LOMBARDI
Born 1951, died 2000, New York
Frank Nugan, Michael Hand and Nugan Hand Ltd. of Sidney Australia, ca. 1972-1980 (8th version), 1988
Pencil drawing on paper
Helga De Alvear Collection, Madrid
Mark Lombardi referred to his drawings, which are the product of a documentary investigation begun in the 1970s when he was working as a librarian in Houston, as “narrative structures” and “a network of lines and annotations organized to convey a story”. These drawings map relations between political, social and economic forces, and illustrate the ties and connections in the networks of influence which have produced international financial and political scandals. The meticulous documentary work created by Lombardi essentially consists of making connections between reports taken from the press, but the form adopted is that of the schematic diagrams used in economics, and this renders the dark, even hidden, abstract structures represented particularly ‘expressive’. Lombardi’s ambition was to make the genre of history painting as a form of the artistic representation of power more contemporary, replacing the dramatic fresco by large looping ‘organigrams’ which form anonymous constellations and relate a story centred on heroic figures in a tide of finance and information. Artificial and prolific, Lombardi’s fractal drawings indicate ways to make these processes transparent, yet paradoxically preserve the hermetic nature of their subjects.
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