By Vilma Nöel:

​

    Seduced by Marcos Anthony's paintings, I couldn't help but express my great hope for his career. As each day passes, he asserts himself with virtuosity, spontaneity and strong, striking characteristics in his work. The keys to his enigmas are lost deep in the unconscious of each of us, admirers of his magical inventions.

​

He invents without hesitation, creates his world within a chimerical, harmonious poetics. He was born as an "indigo child" with everything registered, prepared in spirituality. Child who can come up with new and brilliant ideas every ten seconds.

 

He presented his brilliant work very early in his childhood, demonstrating extreme sensitivity and excess energy. He understood easily to compensate for his lack of hearing and consequent verbal expression. Hence his own learning methods, thanks to the cultural level of his enlightened, enlightened and blessed family, thus having an entire structure to understand him and let him express himself, respecting him within his limits and opening doors for him, encouraging him to learn about other artists who gave a poetic accent to his original fishing. However, he was always faithful to what he received from his own personality.  He was born to shine and transform his world in his own very imaginative way, literally following his mission.

 

And I suspect that it is visited, in the unknown hours of the night, by Renaissance, Florentine, expressionist, cubist, surrealist masters... arrived from ancient times to visit it. It was love that taught him to paint on a surface the contours he felt or relived in the memory of other lives, in a duality that challenges the artist to express himself in brushstrokes.

 

Since the beginning, he has maintained a commitment to a poetic attitude as a source of meaning and creates thought-provoking scenes for our eyes. Images of a subtle metaphysics of symbolic enigmas, which make us thoughtful and which suggest marks linked to the passage of time. Dancing women, geometric women, cones and cubes, transparency, arabesques, prints, frames, circles, spheres, symbols, sensual and graceful baroqueism, certain dotted, well-defined hieroglyphics, which take us analogously, between painting and poetry, lines, sinuous demarcations of zig zags, formal and informal enigmas, implications, evanescent limits of a restless feeling, showing that this artist is a skilled draftsman and excellent colorist...

​

It documents Brazil in the form of a magical dream, so that we have the opportunity to see our land beyond its problems, in a kaleidoscope of joy and hope, which invades and infects us. In the conflict between mass culture and erudite culture, between lay and academic cultural production, between popular reading and the cutting-edge novel, between the sophisticated techniques of internationalist modern art and the primitive, permanently creative popular art, lies Anthony's theme repository.  All this contributing to form the image and connections that he gives us, interpreting works by great masters, past and present. There are two principles of independent forces in his work: the vital and the mytho-biblical.

​

He paints his saints with grace and delicacy, touched by the poetic magic of his sensitivity. Its characters evolve over a pictorial backdrop in a checkered composition of texture and dots present in a set that defines its own style. Hence, we find an essential purity, constituting a phenomenon of expression - before expressing between signs and choreography of colors and shapes - a wordless reason that refers only to its own harmony, designating by contrast the disformity, the duplicity, in a rhapsodic sequence of arranged scenes and repetitions, suggesting melodic, pictorial arcs that intersperse and articulate the dialogue between his paintings of great beauty, dynamism and rhythm.

 

They are spiritual, original, colorful and part of the never-ending story of human life.  We become, in a way, possessed by the energy that comes out of them. Anthony has already accumulated, within his youth, a body of expressive wealth, speaking through his painting in an immediate, intuitive and simple language. This set of works presented here is a testimony to Marcos Anthony's diversity of expression. It allows us to follow the development of this artist who, for our pleasure, invites us to discover, alongside him, the fabulous universe of art he created.

 

                                                                                                                                                  

                                                                                                         

                                                                                                          Vilma Nöel NYC-based artist/sculptor.

​

​

​

​

By Rogério Zola Santiago:

​

      Marcos Anthony paints stories and works that are scenes from the past that he discovered in books, museums and - of course, personalist intuitions. Centuries like this reappear in a new guise, in the brushstrokes that form fabrics and patterns, from medieval Europe to colonial Brazil - with Picassian references (the multiple faces) - and the divisions of expression. In a contemporary figurative way, Marcos Anthony goes to New York carrying in his luggage a Brazil of impactful reinterpretations.

 

Even without the ability to hear the sounds of the world (the artist is deaf), his colors speak of an inner reality in mosaics diluted in pastel tones that border on polychromy. Candelabras, curtains, Imperial tables and the human farce seem to dance under the artisanal tailoring of the artist painter, who enjoys knowing the observer is involved in the plot of the ages he portrays, in a voluptuousness of castles and historical remains, carved tables and rich lace.

 

Egyptian forms and also "naïve" bodies (between primitive and innocent) are reminiscent of Greek statues from the archaic period, (kouros and kóris, respectively men and women with bulging eyes and makeup at the time). Beings that appear in character, half-naked, barefoot, Inca and indigenous, in a positioning with almost no three-dimensionality, showing the view from the front and from the side: one is led to believe in a metamorphosis between different periods of human social evolution, described in a baroque and rococo style (with some decorations and ornaments) pictorial interpretation of the world.

 

​

​

                                                                          Rogério Zola Santiago, journalist and critic from Indiana University, USA.

​

​

​

​

By Oscar D'Ambrosio:

​

            Portraits Diverse due to the multiplicity of her faces, any representation of Frida Kahlo can sound reductionist. In this aspect, Marcos Anthony portrays the Mexican artist's face from the perspective in which she is seen in several ways at the same time, both from a frontal and side view.

 

It is a visual resource that seeks to convey an art paradigm that can be read as female liberation, but also as a symbol of excessive passion.

 

The artist's magic and charm lie in having lived an existence ruled by excesses, both love and pain. Finding images of her in a tropical atmosphere, dressed as a saint or identified as Carmen Miranda are possibilities of a life that opened up to the world and that, therefore, cannot even be found in boxes, but multiplied in portraits, flavors and knowledge.

 

                                                                                                   

 

                                Oscar D´Ambrosio he is a Post-Doctor and Doctor in Education, Art and Cultural History, Master in Visual Arts, journalist and art critic.