DUSTBOUND

Night Café Gallery, 2025

London

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Night Café is pleased to present a new body of work by Marco Bizzarri (Santiago, 1988). The artist uses dust to reflect on complex existential questions surrounding time, loss, and healing. Bizzarri delves deeply into the unique nature of dust, presenting it as both a witness and an archive of what is no longer fully here. It serves as a reminder of how parts endure, tracing resistance across time.

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To investigate these themes, Bizzarri repeatedly returns to the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile, where he documents abandoned towns and objects, recording their ongoing decay and the way time transforms them. It is a region covered by a dense layer of dust, excavated by decades of mining activities. Venturing into often-deserted towns and cities, he captures how light interacts with the dust particles in the air, transforming light into a tangible presence.

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These records serve as references for his paintings, in which he translates the desert’s hazy atmosphere into technically complex compositions. In his practice, dust symbolizes both preservation and transformation. “Suspended in the air, the dust particles metaphorically contain history itself,” Bizzarri explains. Illuminated by light, these particles become unknowable fragments of the past that linger indefinitely, reflecting the artist’s ongoing interest in the passage of time.

The desert’s extreme dryness preserves both material and sensory memories, acting as a repository for remnants of cultures, people, and histories. Dust, like light, shields objects from the elements, while the stillness of the landscape symbolizes how memory resists oblivion. Through its dryness, the desert allows even centuries-old objects to survive, standing as a witness to time and the erasure of memory.

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Bizzarri explores the tension between disappearance and persistence, using the unique conditions of the Atacama Desert as a framework for this investigation. Through his paintings, he reflects on how dust functions as an unknowable witness to the passage of time. He offers a new perspective: dust does not simply preserve, but stands as a bearer of histories that cannot be fully understood, histories that continue to linger long after they have been forgotten.

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