It isn’t easy to talk about Marco Nereo Rotelli’s artistic investigation because as you try to explain it you inevitably end up highlighting only a few of its aspects, while in trying to list the forms in which it is achieved, you lose its depth and overall dimension.

Light, for example, for Rotelli is not merely a field of investigation, but is subject and object, the guiding thread, the result and agent, real and at the same time metaphysical, a psychic force and decoration.

Even the word, an essential moment 0coordinating his work, is both the light of thought and a decorative element, expressed and compressed into concepts.

His works are not even a support for art because art crosses it; even when he uses solid, heavy materials, such as marble, we can’t see the work inserted, but expressed and taken outside the material.

Fate led our roads to cross; while his artistic research was directed at pictograms, I was studying the symbols dear to the peoples of the Middle East.

Marco has investigated the artistic sympathies between the language of poetry and the language of signs; I came first to understanding and then defining the carpet as a sacred space of a symbolic universe. Talking to me about the project, Rotelli defines the carpet as a spiritual place, a garden of ideas.

By opening the Artetotale gallery I have tried to forge a path integrating classical arts with the ancient art of the knotted carpet, my intention being to use this ancestral support to enhance cultural communication between East and West. Marco, through technical complexity, has fully entered into communication with this interdisciplinary overlapping.

The work of art which set off our collaboration is Splendor, i.e what “patrons” enjoy of light (creative spirit, ideas, thought) broken down into warps and wefts and reflected in signs, shapes and symbols. In this context the carpet itself becomes an icon of Rotelli’s art.