critical anthology

walter mac mazzieri

Having to write about the painter Walter Mac Mazzieri from Cà d'Olina, so much I'd like to resemble Giorgio Vasari, the master of art chroniclers. So I'd be able to tell worthily the " marvellous things" of which the legendary "Waltrin" was and still is the protagonist and inventor, or if you like, the creator. And there's another reason too because the superb chronicler from Arezzo came to my mind: the great definition he gives of the character named Tommaso di ser Giovanni di Mone Cassai called Masaccio, who, in my opinion, perfectly fits my friend Waltrin. He "was a very abstract man, like the one who, having fixed all his soul and will on artistic things, took a little care of himself and no care at all about other people. And as he IS he never wanted to think about worldly things or cares… As he was goodness personified… he was so kind in helping and pleasing others, you cannot wish anything better". And so, after having quoted in good words what I know and think about Mac Mazzieri as a man and a very dear friend, I come back to my writing to tell some things I remember about him and which, in my opinion, are useful to better understand his painting and, first of all, the extraordinariness that marks it and that, since the beginning, has struck
critics and famous writers, who remained surprised and amazed in front of the paintings of this "arimanno" ( a Frignano Longobard word meaning "free man" referred to the warriors in charge of the permanent guard). And let's give a look to the chronicles and to some revealing facts. I met Walter Mac Mazzieri twenty-seven years ago in 1970, I don't remember the month, during a dinner in via Ciovasso in Milan. I was with the usual elect "band" of famous names like Bruno Cassinari, Beppino Minieco, Gianni Dova and others: apparently calm, but a bit malevolent towards the brush colleagues. We were talking and gossiping seriously. At the main course I saw a friend of mine sitting at a far table. We said hello happily: it was Osvaldo Prandoni, fond of art and a very famous TV director, very skillful especially in shooting football matches. At the fruit course, Prandoni made a sign: he wanted to speak to me and so I called him at our table. He came near, a bit frightened by the masters sitting with me (but,once they knew who he was, they almost applauded him) and asked if he could show us
the photos of some paintings by a young artist who was a friend of his, that is to say the angelic fair-haired viking wearing glasses who was sitting at his table. Of course we answered "Yes, sure!" and he gave out some colour pictures. We were looking at them when Beppino Minieco, who was the most mistrustful and severe of us, exclaimed:" "Minchia! Who's this wonder?!". This is the story of the exciting moment lived by Walter who, beckoned over, got near trembling and stammered out heaven knows what with much bowing. Since that night in Milan the name of the young painter from Cà d'Olina started to spread. And in fact on July 6th 1970,I published what in my opinion is his first "nationwide extensive review"; then came his first exhibition at the gallery "Cavour" held by Renzo Cortina and several TV programmes; and afterwards the great exhibition at the gallery "Levi" which was visited by more than five thousand people ( among them, enthusiastic, the great critic and poet Sergio Solmi I had invited). Speaking about the exhibition at Cortina's gallery I remember that I phoned Dino Buzzati asking him to write a few lines about that young painter who in a sense called to mind his short stories. Very kindly Buzzati answered me" I obey". And in fact a few days after the 24-year-old Walter Mac Mazzieri could read on the "Corriere della Sera" of October 26th 1971:"A gentle face who could work as a model for Christ framed by not too fluent hair and a redundant small Abraham Lincoln-style beard. The same gentleness and kindness in his way of acting; contrasting with his paintings where sturdy and knotty fairy-tale beings twist, moan, clasp their heads in their hands desperately; beings which seem to come out from a rocky Mexican saga and on the contrary they sprang from the mountain dwellers on the Modena Apennines, where Mazzieri was born twenty-four years ago. No doubt he created his odd reign inhabited by unusual heraldic animals, carried out with such a technical skill to be a case of precocity". Buzzati was precise and controlled as usual: nevertheless, taking into account his great personality and fame, the paper he wrote on and the confused period of the time, this positive review was an authentic poetic "baptism" of and for Walter.
Let's be quite clear: seeing again some paintings of that period in the monograph, still now you are surprised , even amazed, because A pink lime stomach, The collected clouds, Where my thought takes shelter, The clouds are lazy turtles,Our doves' cut wings, A garden of crying fireflies, Ibrahim's house, I never saw into your blue iris, At Banja Luka doves woke us, and so on, are works in which, although something here and there can be raw, he defines a world difficult to forget: first for its inscrutability, for its refined barbarism, for the unperturbed purity with which that odd world is narrated and offered, revealing an undeniable and alarming imagination and genuiness.
I remember that, till some time ago, I had in my studio a small painting by Waltrin representing some of his typical doves resembling some meditative monks from Camaldoli: all those who (fussy abstract masters, haughty sculptor masters, constipated critics, social-Garibaldian realists, late word-free poets) ended up to my house which was like a hotel ( today I live as a recluse, and as "the night came" I only meet Dante, Masaccio, Dino Campana and Arturo Martini…); everyone of them, even without using Beppino Minieco's Sicilian exclamation, stayed there almost in disbelief, to watch the vision of "a perturbing reality", the "poetry of wind and sacrifice" rising inside that canvas. Besides in 1971 the intelligent and sharp critic Giuseppe Marchiori wrote to the publisher Artioli that he had admired " the wonderful edition of a volume dedicated to Mazzieri; a painter who follows, among the very few artists in Italy , the hard route of surrealism and symbolism, exploring a secret and marvellous world. Odd fellow, this Mazzieri who said: freedom means staying alone.( But in this case it would mean an easier freedom than the one you reach living among people, in an unbroken social relation. However those giant monsters of hallucination and interior conflicts originate from Mazzieri's loneliness,too. The painter is really out of standard proportions…)".
After that fatal meeting at dinner, I met Waltrin a lot of times, even if there have been some years of silence between us, due to familiar and personal tragedies; or to the death of legendary friends like Giorgio Pellati, who rode his motorcycle from Pavullo to Milan at 200 kmph merely to refer me Waltrin's greetings( but the true reason was to show me his wonderful new motorcycle that he swore it was German but then I discovered he had assembled it by himself, a marvellous mechanic, or to sell me a crossbow he had finished the day before pretending it was Medieval…). Then another phone call from Waltrin to tell me he had been away from Pavullo for two years, that is… in Venice! He finished his phone call asking me:" Do you like Lambrusco?…" trying to be forgiven for his silent absence.
Old youthful and unaffected times, when we didn't care to know or imagine that, like Shakespeare says,consciousness makes us coward :consciousness in the meaning of a bitter knowledge of evil more than of good; coward in the meaning of unsociable, exausted, perhaps mortified and hurt. Everybody feels like that in certain periods. Till we don't find the invitation and the piece of advice by San Tommaso d'Acquino:"Let your doubts enlighten you!". I don't know if this or part of this happened to Waltrin. To me it did. However that may be , let's proceed on a demanding question: how and why the macmazzieri-style painting was born. A lot of people, and often the most sharp ones, asked this question and everybody tried to answer according to his own cultural and interpretative strength: see the "critical anthology" in this volume, where you can read several pages with which it will be easy and right to agree.Nevertheless I must insist without expecting to say something new, on some details. The first , I dare say the essential one, is the importance of the "native wild village", that's to say Cà d'Olina and its surroundings, because there are the roots of all the themes by Mac Mazzieri; there started to warm the core of his rural-barbaric imagination, sweetened, if you like, by his disposition, later enriched and brightened in the museums of half Europe through the meetings with Goya,Savinio and Magritte and maybe Grunewald and Arcimboldi: fine, dreaming and famous company. There the painter found himself, as he wrote in one of his poems, "sure to be desperate imagination". Note that he says to "be" not to "have": this is poetically and psychologically crucial.It's true that the line is set among other comforting and oneiric verses, but the true and revealing point is there, as you can easily understand by quoting the whole short poem:" The day I shall die,/ sure to be desperate imagination,/ a white dancer/ will count the star-points/on my flesh". The lightning, the core, the injury are there, in that second verse, while the rest of the poem is simply setting: the same you can find in some of his paintings, in those different shapes which are or can be "decorative" or functional to the main figure.
Three years ago, when I introduced the anthological exhibition of the now deceased sculptor Raffaele Biolchini ( who had been, together with the sculptor Davide Scarabelli, fellow in Walter's European and African cultural-wandering adventures), I had supposed that the first and deepest artistic and cultural training of those young artists from Pavullo was not born from the Romanic architectures and Wiligelmo's sculptures in Modena cathedral (Walter assures to hate it, as it's always quoted in connection with him even without having ever seen it) and from such grandeurs but from the several buildings, friezes and Medieval masks of Cà Caluppo, Gallina-Morta, Beccaluva di Sopra, Coscogno, Camatta, Olina and of course Cà d'Olina (where Mac Mazzieri is proud of having been born in the 13th century "Captain's House": on the first floor, because on the ground floor some sheeps, a goat, a cow and a horse "used to live"). Those hard,worn out,tragic faces from the Apennines; those serpentines flashing on the lintels; those half-crumbled suns: there, Walter and his fellows had "read" since they were children the true lesson of time, the true lesson of the old stonecutter-sculptors; the severe harmony originated by a religious faith, as strong as painful,as much loved as ineffective. There Walter and his fellows breathed the cloudy air of desperation and rarely the cheerful one of hope and beauty. The rest of the things seen somewhere else are a supplement: fine, elegant, surrealist, etc., but to them with the evil risk of common, decorative literature.
Recently I've seen Walter again ( recovered from an annoying illness thanks to his wife "Aurora and her pale hands" and to his daughter Melania), and I asked him some simple questions. I had enlightening answers indicating a new way of reading his phantasmagoric world: a reading made in the name of some important interior reasons to add to those imaginative-visual reasons from which, in my opinion, originates a deep enrichment that let us discover and better understand the artist's personality, his attitude towards the suffered or investigated reality, his dominant thought.
First I asked him which of the jobs he did when he was a child, he remembered as the most interesting, apart from the others ( like the collecting of milk in the mountain stables or the before dawn distribution of breakfast sweets in bars). So Walter told me about a job I had never heard of.This one:"when one of the usual showers which hit Cà d'Olina was about to stop, my mother called me and told me to go and pick up nails. Not because at Cà d'Olina rained nails (not even legends tell this, a lot of them are beautiful and intriguing like those about San Michele, the devil, Olina bridge and the bridge Ghost) but simply because while hitting on roads and paths, water exposed the nails lost by horses, discharged by horseshoes. Then we went to sell them… As you can easily understand it was quite an odd thing, of Medieval patience, and also a sign of great poverty. I was telling you before about legends or tales as you say in Tuscany: well… there's one entitled The treasure in the wood near Olina bridge which is about a Trillo who, instead of taking part to the solemn procession for the feast of the "Black Christ" at Acquaria, went secretely on the pebbly shore of a stream near Burgone: as soon as he started to dig hoping to find the famous pot full of golden coins, all hell broke loose: a sudden, very thick fog, barks, horrible screams and unknown beasts who got around him till a whirlwind lifted and hurled him in a mysterious wood at Portogrillo…
Events like these, which I believed true, set my imagination on fire when I was a child. But speaking of the "Black Christ":it's the 12th century wooden polychromatic crucifice of Catalan School we went to see together, do you remember? Look! I haven't got the gift for sacred art, nevertheless I've always had the feeling that ,every now and then, that Christ opens his eyes to look at me and that his shadow sometimes appears on my way…Well, multiply by thousand these imaginative and disturbing elements and you'll have the idea of the reason why my paintings are full of several "monsters", moons and very odd appearances, unusual shapes and characters. I'd like to say that I didn't invent them, because about forty years ago they were already alive in the old houses at Cà d'Olina and flew in the magic air, disappearing in the river called Scoltenna, an Etruscan name… In short, I used to watch and remember: trying to enrich everything visiting churches and museums in half the world(by the way, the Country I like best is Sweden where everything, or almost everything, is always white…)".
Rural, local and magic reality in Walter Mac Mazzieri: but not deriving, as one could expect, from Historia animalium by Aristotle, Naturalis Historia by Pliny, Acerba by Cecco d'Ascoli or from the sensational, alarming and thornily Medieval "bestiaries":I think he has never read them. And not even from surrealists, as the artists he admires most, as he told me, are Giovanni Pisano with his pulpits, with those crowds of the damned and worshippers, Harmenszoon van Rembrandt and the distracted Pontormo…
Another question. Which is the childish experience you remember more often as it was useful for your painting?" Waltrin's eyes lit up:" A lot, but there's one I still dream about at night.A real experience, not a fairy-tale. I was about five or six years old, it was Carnival and my mother,realizing I was gloomier than usual, sowed a bright green dragon costume for me.Very glad, I went out to join the festival with the other children at Olina, that is the biggest village while Cà d'Olina is only a small suburb. The afternoon was white with snow and I hoped to find a lot of people: on the contrary I walked the three kilometers to Olina without meeting a living soul.Olina was completely silent and empty. I waited: no one. So I came back home sadly and I felt like a poor green worm in the white landscape. Once more nobody, just silence. Well, as soon as I got home I didn't find my relatives who had gone somewhere to get fun, but a red parrot I didn't know. So I talked to him for two or three hours.Then he flew away towards the Etruscan river…
Well, my life has always been like this: a child dressed up in a dragon costume, a lonely pilgrimage in the white silence, a red parrot… I'd like to add that I've always felt like a small bird, let's say a robin: also because in my opinion when someone chirps to a robin or to a goldfinch he becomes a robin or a goldfinch too! Or if you like a dove: I've always loved doves very much. And in fact I often paint them. Yes, a lot of animals; but also men: distracted, with big horny hands, hairy, with fixed enchanted eyes; sometimes petrified, sometimes eager for everything, deformed by hunger and solitude. But these men, my men, were those from Cà d'Olina and not from Machu Picchu in Peru as someone thought!I had been painting the men from Pavullo and its surroundings since I was a boy, thirty-five years ago. When I was only a boy, after practising drawing comics (they were my first school, together with the issues of The Masters of Colour; curiously I was very impressed by Morlotti) and after attending in vain and for a short period of time, the art institute Venturi in Modena, I decided to face figure painting by myself (I have never been artistically interested in landscapes), as I was getting culturally stronger through the endless discussions with Biolchini and Scarabelli, together we travelled all over the world: often drawing to get a living on the pavements of Rome, Zurich, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, in Africa too and who knows where else!".
"And you wouldn't be satisfied to visit Florence, Siena and Venice!Why this craving for pilgrimages abroad?"
"Well", Waltrin answers me" one day I realized that I stayed here I would have gone mad.
Mind you: I belong to this place, I feel like a tree, a fruit, a cloud of Pavullo or better of Cà d'Olina. I loved and still love everything here deeply: but one day I felt inside myself a rejection for this "cradle" of poverty, of Etruscan rivers and legends. And so I went away. But I came back at last, do you know why?To paint my "Last Judgement (don't be proud, but you gave me the idea of this definition). In fact I want to tell you that for a long time, exactly since 1963, I had put that mysterous "Mac" between my nama and my surname to mean my will of separation from the memories connected with my chilhood.So since then, but perhaps from time out of mind I had begun not to judge but to represent the great scene of a "Judgement"whose subject and main character was the barbarian world which was in front of my eyes when I had been born and which lay on me as heavy as a yoke. An unguilty world, if you like, as it was a victim of contrasts, absences and humiliations of any kind; a world full of magic, sensational,devilish and witchlike elements, which sometimes became elegiac and emotional (in fact I remember and enjoy a lot portraying beautiful and auroral maidens, moons, flowers and doves…). In my opinion the most precise way to define these elements is to represent them freely through their deformed and invented "possibilities". And I did this when I felt "sure to be desperate imagination". I speak like this not to invite people to read my "stories" or "small stories" tragically, but to show what the real source of my painting is: certainly it's not uprooted from human life,from troubles that can be spiritual too, not at all: because when an artist leaves to his most different images, having inside himself the interior strength that compels him to remember that all of us are waited, like it or not, in that Shakespearian "undiscover'd country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns", this is the time when any interpretation of temporal reality can't be a practice remote from man. I say it again, I don't want to set myself up as a judge of anything or anybody; and nor do I want to insinuate that the souls of the people from Pavullo nowadays…no…!I only wanted to give my visual evidence enthusiastically, as a painter, freely imagined, by making "true" a world that has inside itself the same, often mysterious and fertile "truth" of legends: like the one about the treasure in the wood near Olina, in vain searched during the procession for the feast of the"Black Christ" from Acquaria."
( I don't know why, but when I think again of Walter Mac Mazzieri's paintings, of his stories and small stories of imprisoned souls who one by one, like tesseras of a rural and bright Medieval mosaic, form his sometimes childish, sometimes desperate or hallucinated Last Judgement,every now and then I recall, not for contrast but perhaps for a kind of aluminated and secret mutual heartbeat, some not infernal but paradisiac verses by Dante:"Sì come schiera d'api, che s'infiora/ Una fiata ed una ritorna/ Là dove suo lavoro s'insapora…".
A quotation out of place? Who can tell…..?)

critical anthology

walter mac mazzieri