The Umberto Di Marino Gallery is pleased to present Marcello Jori’s first solo exhibition at Casa Di Marino,entitled Pensiero Dipinto in Movimento Scritto. This exhibition follows two previous solo shows, Supereroi and Jori Di Napoli, organized by the gallery at its former location in Giugliano. Both exhibitions, focused on Jori’s painting practice, already hinted at a narrative approach that the artist would later develop through his “painted writings.”
This new project is entirely dedicated to that aspect of Jori’s work, which, through drawing and comics, has succeeded in telling universal stories on multiple levels. Stories that today, especially among younger audiences, find new vitality, offering fresh insights into a medium like comic drawing, which has too often been relegated to “the lower circles of Hell.” For the first time, this project aims to stage the complexity—at times disturbing,
absurd, visionary, and erudite—of Jori’s practice. The exhibition, which will take place in both the gallery and domestic spaces of Casa Di Marino, will resemble a small retrospective, reflecting on a gesture that Jori no longer sees as mere comic drawing but as Pensiero Dipinto in Movimento Scritto (“Painted Thought in Written Movement”), which also serves as the exhibition’s title.
The show traces the evolution of Jori’s work, from his early panels created in the ‘70s and ‘80s with the Valvoline group for magazines like Linus and Frigidaire, through the aggressive and provocative tone of comics like Feto e Carletto, where a baby and a fetus, behaving like adults, wreak havoc on the city in search of the lost maternal womb.
From the subversive, experimental, and ironic nature of his early works, the exhibition will also focus on the brightly lit, hyper-realistic panels he created for Per Lui magazine in the ‘80s, a pivotal stage leading to his large, dreamlike, mythological narratives, always tinged with irony and provocation, published by Rizzoli, such as Lo Straordinario Viaggio del Mondo and La Storia Dipinta dell’Arte. With the absurd ambition of writing the history
of the world and of art, the artist brings this vision to life, fully aware that it remains a partial, personal, sometimes abstract, and deliberately altered history—both mythical and legendary.
It is a complex vision of the world and the arts that Jori offers the viewer, including through his own voice. Over the years, Jori has often read his own texts from the panels, adding a more intimate and personal tone to the stories. Just as happened with Le Predicazioni, read at Emi Fontana in Milan in the early 2000s, at the exhibition’s opening, Marcello Jori will read to the public some of the most iconic passages from his history of art.