critical anthology

walter mac mazzieri

Beyond the motionless coils of a reality that influences us as a despot, beyond the logic judgment which leads us to think about the seeming truth of shapes, their immobility, their morale, open to the artist and to those of us who are less controlled by habits and less subdued to inhibitions, the profane worlds of instinct and myth, of the artificial rebellion of dreams, the incredible  unknown towns, with inhabitants freed from our drawbacks of affections and roles, of economy and politics; men without persuasions, who think of completely useless products, men remade even in their independence, for whom gravity, distance and time are not coherent terms any more.

The temporal dimension is only an endless time fixed in contemplation and realized in a winding and snake-like itinerary of psyche, with odd oriental transplants, a metamorphosis of god-men, of herd-women, of lyrical and dramatic reasons. When temporal and space limits are lost, life becomes heretical and outrageous in the hands of mysterious forces.

Walter Mac Mazzieri acts inside this unconditioned life, with problems that go beyond experience and force man beyond the known and what is scientifically comprehensible. He is an Emilian painter belonging to the generation of the last postwar period, an odd and brilliant young man who has,  during the recent years, revealed surprising qualities in inventing fairy-tale creatures, magic treasures, a range of hallucinating proposals refined by a dramatic intelligence. In his paintings there isn’t the idea of place and time, the terms of reality are not present, replaced by a deep imaginative retaliation, by evocations that are an indication of restlessness and alarm if they don’t show some straining or naivety.

In his best works (The face of lifeless things, 1969; Contemplation of a pastor, 1969;The pale reality of Greek statues, 1970; Towns gave the square to the moon, 1970; Grey fancies of a night horseman, 1970;While going beyond the mountains clouds lose imagination, 1972; The red moon doesn’t kill the deep ceramics of desire, 1972) Mazzieri reproduces elements belonging to an old legendary heritage, interlaces the ancient threads of the myth of a dark and austere grandeur, recalls the echo of historical events  as if they were transfigured and idealized from a medieval theosophist, with a sometimes  antique stylization in a sly way that makes his themes elegant and refined and reflects the aristocratic dignity of a subtle mind.

Though he follows the typical surrealist framework- it’s compulsory to recall Max Ernst, Magritte, Brauner, Labisse and Savinio as this group deeply influenced the contemporary taste, he gives an original version of this movement and, in his particular example of cultural automatism, at the end the definition remains simply approximate.

His painting ( where several literary influences can be seen and scoffing has a primary role, from Hoffman to Kafka, from Lautréamont to Poe and Strindberg) takes to light as from a tragic apotheosis and with a resonant creativity, an absurd but greatly appealing society. The different human figures in the scene are marked by a perfect existential variance and in this range of appearances that represent a hidden narration, a poem, an autobiographical report, there are endless words, unusual colours to express oneself, because no word, image or colour has just one meaning, just one possibility to exist or a fixed and consistent destination.

It’s the age of the neutral, of the apocryphal, of the enchanted where every suspended construction and every anecdotal paradox with expressive possibilities, a profile or a coloured glint are possible. “Love is a feeling that flows inside yourself like a white thread” Mac Mazzieri wrote in some prose poems (Stones of mechanic imagination and The mad freedom of poets) in 1968/69. “Sometimes I hear it flee from my breast and overflow, with wet roses from a garden of crying fireflies, and with the name of a swallow of breath…..Poets destroy the mouthless monuments scraping clouds, because they wall them up, as empty as reeds. My lips are too thin to kiss your diadems of melted imagination among your hair, I haven’t got filed hands for your roses, and- inside- a still planet since a long time”. Pressing rhythms of fogs and lights alternate in his vision of a slow fading of things in restlessness which is fear of revealing oneself and happiness to disrupt the natural code, the fictitious law of the matter.

There isn’t an established place of arrival and departure in this Chinese box with evident sexual symbols:it’s necessary to admit that everyone has his own anxieties; everything may happen, as nothing is known about this complicated machine that has started to work. The sound, the lost ideals, the same sentimental harmony organize among the boundless silences and the incredible distress linking the tender abyss of memory with the livid and metallic plains of practical experience.

Mac Mazzieri is delighted by these adventurous games of psyche, by these ambiguous dimensions sweetly inextricable and lost, like an explorer who arrives for the first time on a fascinating island. Here, in a land of uninterrupted allegory, without an evident effort, he succeeds in tuning his voice tending to sweetness, with the rhythm of an extraordinary life that can be defined as romantic: everyday life instead is overwhelmed and denied and doesn’t accept itself. The terms of history and the mechanisms of reason are reversed; in the end-Mazzieri suggests-reality is not the life we are living and that we tend to believe true; when it is felt by our senses it’s only a casual meeting, an extemporary sum of events. By now the painter has understood the game of events: he finds what he wants to find in the interior processes of phenomenons that, at first, may seem unexpected, with the submerged dimension of the dream, he chooses the subjects and the linguistic spurs: what interests him more is, without exaggeration and apparent manierism, the mocking and the tragic fineness of the supernatural, the story to the bounds of the unbelievable that can lead us to look for a deeper reality escaping from us and at the same time feeding us through unscrutable ways with veins full of melancholy, of secret conflicts with the world we live in or, better, we pretend to live in, putting into effect operations that are implicitly distorting and grotesque.

All this heavy store shifts through the indefinite time of imagination, under the influence of a panic rapture that distorts reality and, at the same time, raises us above the dullness of existence and the meanness of usual relations with its conflicts and its awkwardness. When the painter was very young but helped by his genuine intellectual elasticity, once he had entered the appealing and sometimes wicked labyrinth of metamorphosis and he had discovered some esoteric and weird spurs, he tried to create his own theatre of the absurd with figuratively well-defined paintings, precise and deep meanings full of intuitions and mysterious recesses. Concentrated exclusively on his own metaphors, he succeeded in telling us, almost in details, the biography of his characters recurring from painting to painting, as if he had known and painted them  standing in front of him: the big eyes, the swollen breasts, the hard and strong muscles that can’t be typical of an earthly health, smoothed like river stones or ripe fruits. They are almost ready to bear unaltered the corrosion of centuries. In this way Mazzieri shows an imaginative and ironic charge that can’t be explained only with his meeting,in 1968, with the masters of metaphysics and surrealism (at the great exibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Tourin, The Disturbing Muses). “It wasn’t a sudden conversion; it happened regularly” Renzo Margonari wrote” and the meeting with this exibition came at the right moment in conclusion”. But it’s obvious that that date was fundamental for the painter who lived isolated in Pavullo and he was greatly helped also by the meeting with the poet and critic Renzo Margonari, a refined and creative mind, who first noticed his value and spurred him to go beyond the apparent aspect of things through imagination, in the narrative field of mystery where Mazzieri works now with a great stylistic mastery. Sudden conversions usually last for a short period, they sink into doubts, on the contrary, Mazzieri’s turning point took place on the basis of precise mental natural gifts; the young Emilian artist kept inside himself a high tendency to an imaginative ransoming of life, a basic, almost native Gothicism that, in order to reveal itself completely, only needed an underlying theme, a key-landscape.

The 1966 paintings, like Thoughts, and the 1967 ones, A character, Freedom, with some other paintings quoted by the author (“for example the child talking to the little animal, in the background the symbol of those rolled watching characters”), give clearly the outlines of this early painting full of themes and extraordinary cues, interesting either from a surrealist-imaginative point of view or because they broach several subjects that are  worthy to be pondered because they try to reach, from a new angle, the definition of emblems which are the basis of our cultural and artistic interests. That is to say they are referred to fundamental questions that are more or less the same everyone asks, to problems regarding man, his faith and his alienation in his age or, as Mazzieri means “not-age” where one can rely only on that imaginative and personal performance that every careful person plays inside himself  every time he shares the emotions transmitted by a painting. Mazzieri melts memory and invention and with each new work he seems to question his values; he constantly recalls the acute crisis of his itinerary with sensitive often vivid transpositions, not forgetting to put between the lines his irony and resentment (see: The face of lifeless things,1969; Contemplation of a pastor,1969; The poet in the subject of light blue,1969; The sad  tale of men, 1972; Mother is an Aries into the heart,1972; The man from Magrignana, 1972; Giving Autumn leaves, 1972). There’s the tendency to promiscuity, to represent human qualities and defects linked together in the  fatal sense of life:they are underlined as the two terms of a non-existent relation between good and evil, knowledge and mythical ignorance,vice and naivety. It might look like the establishing of a brutal chaos, but the painter succeeds in concentrating the rhythm on particular constant cores of condensation, with virtuosities of formal distortions and cromatic, even phonic and sonorous effects; a kind of movie shots with close-ups, back-lighting and cut figures that create unreal depths in order to focus characters or elements in the background. These operations compel him to face gradually a field full of real difficulties, not at all close to the synthetic contemporary language, nonetheless Mazzieri’s figurative impasto doesn’t reduce to the sum of its elements, but creates a language of unusual flavour and  this gives a coherent portrait of the painter and of his personality  which, once that it’s cut from the excesses typical of the youth, can find a safe place in contemporary art.

critical anthology

walter mac mazzieri