Marco Lando

Artist Statement

Marco Lando’s work explores the unconscious through photography, digital manipulation, and the language of theatre. Drawing from his background in New York theatre, he creates surreal, otherworldly scenes using dramatic lighting, staged compositions, and existential narratives.

Working exclusively in black and white, Lando creates landscapes where human figures, architecture, and fragments of the past appear suspended between reality and dream. The absence of color gives his images a stark, forensic quality, allowing the uncanny to emerge without becoming sensational.

His ongoing series Alchemy transforms architectural fragments into post-apocalyptic visions, while Specter of Belief draws on the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna to explore mythology, faith, history, and the persistence of symbolic forms. Across his work, Lando is interested in fragmentation and transformation, creating worlds where familiar structures break apart and reform. His photographs exist between theatre and reality, reason and instinct, memory and imagination. www.marcolando.org

Biography

Marco Lando is an Italian photographer and digital artist whose work explores the unconscious, mythology, fragmentation, and the instability of reality. His artistic practice is influenced by his background in New York theatre, where he worked in acting, production design, photography, and multimedia performance.

Lando creates digitally manipulated black-and-white photographs characterized by dramatic lighting, theatrical compositions, solitary figures, architectural fragments, and mysterious landscapes. His ongoing series Alchemy presents architectural forms suspended within celestial and post-apocalyptic environments, while Exile explores isolation through solitary figures within monumental landscapes.

His project Specter of Belief, developed for the city of Ravenna, Italy, adapts the visual language of Byzantine mosaics into photographic compositions. The project was exhibited at NiArt Gallery in Ravenna in 2020 and later at Gobbi Photo Studio Gallery in Urbino.

Lando has exhibited internationally at venues including the Studio Psacaropulo Museum in Trieste, NiArt Gallery in Ravenna, Gobbi Photo Studio Gallery in Urbino, Site: Brooklyn Art Gallery, and Viridian Artists in New York. He received the Special Prize for Photography and Digital Art at the 2021 DeSidera Art Festival, was longlisted for the 2021 BBA Photography Prize in Berlin, and was a finalist at Wells Art Contemporary in the UK.