Marco Petrus was born in Rimini in 1960, but has been living in Milan ever since his early childhood. Brought up in a creative environment thanks to his artist father, he soon developed an interest in architecture and starts experimenting with printing techniques and artistic reproduction.

The paintings from his first period are characterized by a strongly marked and insisting use of the sign, legacy of his training and experience as an engraver. In these works, however, one can already perceive the almost metaphysical immobility of architecture which will later on become the artist’s “trademark”. Over time, Petrus’ brushstroke disappears in order to give space to an increasingly rigorous and linear game of colors marked by clear, well-defined lines and plain color fields, in search of essentiality and linearity of composition that will gradually start to characterize his artistic research. Between the end of the 90’s and the first 00’s his painting style undergoes a new perspective gap opening its analytical look, on the one hand, in an increasingly stricter manner, to the investigation of the very structure of urban and architectural shapes, and on the other to embracing examples of recent and modern urban forms of many European, American and Asian cities and megalopolis, as if he were to sketch a multi-faceted and highly-characterized map of the infinite architectural forms existing in the world. Immersed in the process of a growing stylization of the form, his latest endeavors bring him to pair his urban representations with their abstract “correspondences” (where lines, signs and simple colored blocks take the place of prospective structures, angles and windows) thus “freezing” the very shape of the urban landscape in a pure play of abstract stylizations. Starting from these contemporary landscapes’ icons and by progressively analyzing the “space” of these individual forms, painting itslef changes its own language as well as its formal approach to the canvas, leding itself away from the simple figurative reproduction of elements, of glimpses of the urban landscape, in order to become a rigorous and impeccable research on the “pure form” of architecture.

The analysis of the original form thus becomes the pretext for a wider research on the very meaning of painting and represention.