Between the 1960s and 1970s, Mario Schifano, photographer and painter, lived in a studio with dozens of televisions always on at low volume, constantly flooding his visual space with an uninterrupted flow of images.

Mario Schifano isolated the image from a television screen, capturing it by taking a picture of it and then he emulsified it on the canvas finishing it with glaze. Brilliant!

These slightly blurred images, which are not very sharp or bright compared to our current standards, are set within the black circular frame of a cathode-ray tube and hold clocks with precise hour hands (Ora esatta; “Exact time”) and still images of Italian cities with their names written with quotes from art history of the program “Italian 20th-century Masters,” stills of political figures from the news, as well as fragments, enlargements, details, and spots of color. 

Source: URL

Book:

Pola Francesca, Barbero Luca Massimo, Museo d’arte contemporanea Roma and Archivio Mario Schifano. Laboratorio Schifano. Roma: MACRO. 2010.