Almost in parallel with the shamanic painting, is the link dedicated to the Italian world, or more precisely Tuscany, where Beck has been living in recent years. While intertwining spiritual Asian influences with the mysterious aura that has always surrounded the extinct Etruscan culture, Beck recreates his own vision of the habitat of the people that came from the sea.
Marwin was deeply struck by the impressive Etruscan statues brought back to light in the Seventies and displayed today at the Etruscan Museum of Murlo, near Siena. These statues wear hats that are identical in shape to those of Mexican carreteros (but also to some ancient Chinese funerary statues), with eyes evoking those depicted in African tribal masks and long beards in the truest Babylon style. The Artist perceived that these findings, the real “archetypes of the hybrid people”, could be the tip of an even more impressive iceberg and threw himself into carrying out extensive research. In the end, his intuition led to follow the traces of an ancient Etruscan settlement and of an autochthon culture that Beck renamed Etruvia to distinguish it from the already well-known historical theories. Very soon, his efforts brought the first positive results (the polyhedric Beck learnt the work of an archaeologist hands on, many years ago, when involved in excavations in the Uzbek Samarkanda and Khiva area). Ancient walls and underground galleries in secluded Tuscan countryside ignored by tourism have begun to yield treasures that had been preserved for thousands of years.
Hence, late in the Spring of 2007, Beck announced the finding of an impressive quantity of hand-written manuscripts and drawings, later on called “the Etruvian treasure”, and started restoring and showing those parts that were violated by time and the inclemency of the weather.
Beck soon realized that a amidst widely heterogeneous material, both for its linguistic incomprehensibility (let us not forget that the writings of this people are still unintelligible today), and for the vastness of artistic content belonging to all the different levels of expression, a collection of works stood out for the clarity of the visual language and consistency of style and some of which bear the traces of the initials of the same craftsman.
With this painstaking work, Beck managed to identify and isolate a source of ancient artwork until now unknown and attributable to one author (or his workshop) who he would call the Anonymous Etruvian.
The rest is current day history, and the results of the method that Beck summarises in the manifest of the Creative Archaeology start to create a stir.
The exhibition, in the prestigious surroundings of the LifeGate Café, is totally devoted to the works of the Anonymous Etruvian, rediscovered, reconstructed and restored by Marwin Beck and gives an enchanting insight into the past that for so long was sunk in oblivion.
Beck takes us back to the heart of ancient Etruvia, inhabited by people devoted to fishing and gardening and he offers us thought-provoking and intense insights, full of special nostalgia for their world that disappeared into the enticing hilly Tuscan landscape way.
Gestures and postures rich in overwhelming inner sensitivity, almost baroque, and with a clear Mediterranean matrix, with total simplicity and acute ability announce what will resurface centuries later in the myriads of small influences or clear evocations be they of the composition, thematic or structural, both in the era of classic painting and in the era of the most anti-academic modernism of the beginning of the XX century, which is more than obvious if we look at the extraordinary examples brought back to life by Beck.
A wide section of the works being exhibited is dedicated to the Etruvian fauna and flora, whereby the ichthyic-graphic and birdlife-graphic series prevails, which surprises and casts its spell on us not only for the ancient mastery of the detailed execution, but also for its scientific implications since it seems to announce from centuries far back in time that which only the modern era, the Enlightenment and European encyclopaedism will make possible – i.e. the classification and scientific observation of details in living species, demonstrating how in this field too the Etruvian culture was a formidable forerunner for the basis of our own civilization.
(text by Cristina Bongiorno)
(translantion in english by: Studio Kelma di Patrizia Baroni, Milano)