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critical anthology |
walter mac mazzieri |
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HE'S A GREAT DREAM-MAKER
by Bruno Cernaz
(from "Gazzetta di Modena", may 1976)
If
the so called "Culture Hall" wasn't the greatest utopia
of official cultural institutions, it would have been the worthiest
place to contain the great exibition Walter Mac Mazzieri is holding
now with a Franciscan attitude and proper logistic in St. Vincent's
monumental church.
And so, while the so called "Culture Hall" ( or better
The Civic Modern Art Gallery), in the name of an unknown planning
and management, is frustating its use in useless stammerings of
ideological and content emptiness, our Mac, with this impressing
exhibition retrains as the most brilliant artist of the new generation
from Modena (and not only from Modena).
We like considering him as a great dream-maker full of the most
natural and open creativity, completely bent on collecting dreams
(belonging to him and to other people) and reproducing them in
the great spaces of his pictorial experiences.
Because, as he is a "dream-maker", Mazzieri loves the
great areas: if he had lived in the past centuries, he would
have belonged to the explosive race of the fresco painters of
churches and palaces ( he might have been an endless Tiepolo a
poet of the last tales about the Serene Venice…).
Mac is a "poet" too: his "tales", like those
by Tiepolo, find a place before or after time. But they are always
on a double dimension fading between reality and representation.
He is telling extending and expanding universes- figures, expressions,
movements- completely wrapped ( or better exorcized) by colour.
And it's this "colour" we love best about Mazzieri:
this colour that has always caught and imprisoned us in its evocative
dimension so much that we have lost our memory in the secret plots
of deep and dreaming light blues, leading us to the depths of
things and fantastic characters.
From an out of time heraldry Mazzieri has brought his busy "bestiary"
on a theatrical "stage" of wings without backdrops and
doors wide-open over frames and brushes.
His colour represents the "tone" of his tale; the key-note
of the spirit. And, as from a new and more alchemic zuaberfest,
Mazzieri evokes the sounding sequence of his "Magic flute",
giving, like the tinkling Mozartian Papageno, the dancing and
silvery A to his own "imaginary symphony".
This
is of course pure and limpid reverie but wrapped by emotional
situations not easily referable to the conventional mould. Unless
we want to consider as a "mould" the colour Mac uses
with his hands full. But as it was stated before, it's his "tone",
his being and becoming and his poetic "code" and the
poetics itself is the existence of the artistic act.
So Mazzieri experiences the circularity of time if it's true,and
it is true, that each of his painted tales refers to a previous
element and anticipates another sequence of moments and situations.
So his "characters" know the endless ins and outs of
transmuting masks and of the representations of the ephemeral
passage from a sardonic grin to a tear, from a glance to a question.
And as he is part of the group of "dream-makers", his
paintings take life from the dark ambiguity of good and evil;
from the good genius opposed and in symbiosis with its evil genius.
In this mixture of positive and negative is the core of an infectious
artistic act that enlightens and fades the colours before and
after time. And in these banners of an old and future book of
characters something, which is "sacred" too, stirs.
If for sacred, we mean the continuity and the sign, the memory
and the prophecy of a ritual that has become a tale.
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|
critical anthology |
walter mac mazzieri |
|