critical anthology

walter mac mazzieri

Mazzieri is surely a "case": I don't mean something that, in the present debate, has not been considered or has been forgotten or is consciously against the general trend. Mazzieri is a peculiar case because he is completely "out" (rather than "in"), as my friend Caminati says about himself (but, in my opinion, he isn't at all).
He's "out" (like Margonari who isn't out, Margonari who studied him and who had the merit to let me know him), because he really seems to come from another dimension, with his own time, as from a known latitude, where the troubles, the tragedies and the nightmares of everyday quests of those who are "in" (at least in a problamatic meaning) don't pass, not even at a stratospheric hight.
Mazzieri constructed and looked for his own nightmares by himself, in his own dreams, maybe in an expansion (that is completely "out" too) of the infant monstruous. The only link with our well known universe of figurative culture (I dare say historical) is the surprising and disconcerting relation with the "Mexican" artists, in his typical changing Orozco's and Rivera's "campesino" everyday rural life into a visionary heroic world. Nonetheless that was a way to mythicize a particular social situation in a well defined revolutionary historical period. On the contrary Mazzieri creates the heroic stature and the visionary emphasis in his own imagination, I dare say in his own room, but with such a violence, a stubborness and a strenuous devotion that, more than surprising and disconcerting, end up to be almost inexplicable, even absurd. Really absurd, if in the end painting wasn't the most fascinating glimmer of the absurd, really at all levels from the sociological one to the individual paranoia. Nonetheless it's only through painting that we can visit Mazzieri's incredible and unexpected imaginative land: a land hidden in a small village in the Modena area, perhaps not far from the highway, a symbol of our economic "miracle".
That's why Mazzieri is a case, like very few other artists. A "case" of imaginative violence and concentration that only Filonov with his mystic and visionary root (but historical too) had shown us.

critical anthology

walter mac mazzieri