critical anthology

walter mac mazzieri

Venice attracts and ravishes him to the same extent it has attracted and ravished artists and writers, above all foreigners,in the past. In 1833 in Venice Chateaubriand finds youth, happiness and a fresh and careless grace. Even the "sadness" that seems to permeate the atmosphere of the town fills his wonderful Reverie.
Venice, where Walter Mac Mazzieri arrives in 1984 to stay there for about two years (his studio-house is situated in Fondamenta degli Ormesini,2628),becomes a kind of reassuring shelter if compared to the dullness of life, to "the days that are always the same" spent in Pavullo. The lagoon town suggests deeper meditations, allows extraordinary experiences, offers itself to the contemplation and to the memory of affections and love declarations . It looks like a beautiful creature smiling to an unknown lover. The monuments,the buildings and the lagoon have the contents of an unexpected revelation, they are born and die in different lives. And painting will record this extraordinary experience of revelation.
It's a sensation of sweetness that allows the wandering of the mind and of imagination the artist from Pavullo chose for vocation and fate. "Venice" where Mazzieri "can make a comparison between heaven and earth and realize that two heavens exist, because the sea too seems to go beyond the sky, identifying with it. It seems to be an everlasting instability and, when there isn't a mainland, figures become almost aerial, they split and fly".
The visible offers itself to the visionary because the artist lets himself lead by the wonder of his eyes in order to reach the miracle of transfiguration, to widen the range of images, to set facts and characters in a fanciful and mythical dimension. The occasions from which the paintings of this period originate are constituted by moments of intense life, short sensations, feelings of vital intensity,joy and sadness. The hints of sadness allow the artist a puzzled delay and the listening of the deepest echoes of his soul that recall an acute longing for his infant places and his youth he has just left. So the artist asks himself Where are you taking me to die full moon,1984. It's a voluntary exile and Mac is full of sadness and asks himself where this adventure, this desire of looking for happiness, new sensations, poetry and illusions will lead him.
Referring to an Egyptian ichnography keeping traces of "death", Mazzieri, who faces his anxieties, imagines he is carried by the night, personified by a horseman with the aspect of a woman and a bird. A detached winged character of a sidereal bestiary riding a compassionate and obedient horse in a dream lunar landscape that is full of solitude, fear and perhaps of recurring spectres of death. Past and present mix in the memory of the artist who is in search, through the places of his childhood and youth,of an identity and self-awareness when he decides to establish in Venice.The invocation to the moon reveals a great sense of astonishment, it's a kind of initiation song, of absolute pureness in a representation that, with strongly surrealist meanings, goes back to figures and tales of a mythical and popular imaginary world that is already present in his previous paintings and renews its wonders and its evocative strength.
Again the autobiographical elements construct his painting recalling affections and making feelings extraordinary, feelings that are the terms of representation in The honey lagoon,1984. The figure with a book in his hands sitting on a shell wants to grasp the memory of his past experiences which are enlarged and his head gets enormous proportions, like a mountain with the places of his memories because in the Venetian loneliness the happy love experiences, the sweet desires and the past sighs become enormous. Perhaps Dante is wright when he says that there's no bigger suffering than remembering the happy time of misery.
In narrative itineraries given to the recalling of personal stories and to the desire of an imaginary return to his native village, the analysis of single moments, by which all his work is connoted, passes through a varied visionarity, where the aspects of waking become the aspects of dream and places and times follow one upon the other outside all logic. These sequences give vividly the sense of detachment felt by the artist because he is aware he couldn't renew the good experience (the tree on the head doesn't give any more fruits), he thinks he can get close to those places over which he tries to fly like a bird, only with a dreamer's mind. The scene is that of a dream where it may happen the "ego" splits into several characters, felt not as "others" but as "himself". Building a semantic bridge that allows to pass from the proper sense to the figurative one, Mac plays with the linguistc meaning of The honey lagoon that is also "The honeymoon" because in the past Venice was the favourite destination of newly-wed couples. It still has the strength to puzzle, also because an artist, like Mazzieri, constantly inspired can make everything poetic and noble. In the memory of love disillusions painting finds new spaces for soft ecstatic and affectionate tones, a sentimental life still able to give tenderness. And with an aristocratic naturalness of accents and emotional intensity Your daughter the moon, 1984,is conceived. The artist, who knows love and its pains, paints his ideal woman who, like the sky, comes at night with her shadow and her mantle of stars round which to wrap. She comes like a cloud over a corn-field from which green trees and bushes emerge. It's a coveted landing to renew mutual affections, a feverish love liveliness, a process of falling in love felt like a miracle state. A landing described with wonder and respect and the sweet creature reveals the spontaneity of this extraordinary condition, while the artist lives the enchantment of a possible loneliness lived together, isolated from the rest of the world.Expressed in terms of a passionate review of enchantments, love is the main inspiring element in almost all his production. The moon too, the artist often thinks of it, becomes an ideal projection of loving contemplation. In its enchanting connotation it goes temporarily beyond interior conflicts. Its light spreads like a veil under which the artist and her lover's dreams indulge.
The art experience becomes also a poetical and love relation, as shown in The wave fisherman at Murano,1984. Travelling by ferry at night, the sea looks green, muddy, grim and terrifying. The artist makes come out of water, trembling in its ancient laments, a poet looking for fancies of absurd things, waves and sensations in a dreamy and elegiac melancholy; this fantastic character discovers in a silent contemplation, the sea, the moon and the idyllic purifying visions of the town that becomes a place of mystery, where the tale has a suspended dimension through images taken beyond their easy usual aspect and emotional meanings of immediate and sweet effect. Every form, every colour may become in poetry an element of beauty, ecstasy and passion.
The artist loves talking to figures representing the rich artistic Venetian heritage and, carefully observing life and places, he finds all the elements tending to reveal themselves in a creative mixture of styles. And in the painting of big dimensions The Byzantine night,1984-1991, a giant St. George, chasing a dragon, a symbol of evil, ends up to "fight" a harmless small eel. The saint's sword becoming a long stick, the eel, with a woman's face, rescued by a small angel, the "humanized" church tower looking at this absurd scene that, lit by the full moon, takes place in St.Mark's square covered by water become, with surprising disrespect, grotesque and mocking modules of the free game of characters and places, investigated and explored in their alternative peculiarity if compared to reality. It's not a chance that what might seem at first sight a realistic town view reveals, to tell the truth, an organized construction according to an emotional and visual escalation and an almost usual meeting becomes extraordinary on the canvas. The painting, like others we'll talk about later, has two dates: this means it was painted in 1984 in Venice and then "resumed" in Pavullo in 1991, because the artist, after his return to his town at the end of 1985, adds a range of shades of interior themes to it.
Mazzieri proves he has mastered the technique of splitting up figures. The representation of the distortion of facts and values, the series of misunderstandings, of inventive situations, of changes and scenic strategies originate from their inscrutability. To this theme belongs The tempting angel's night,1985, where the statues that "reside" above on Gothic and Byzantine palaces, come down in order to perform their puppet theatre. The Madonna with the child in her arms who, a bit irreverently produces night lights, is "seduced" by the angel with a snake in his hand, symbol of temptation. The piercing glance concentrated to catch a view, a situation and an episode are set, with an amazed overabundance of imagery, in a vision full of attributive and particularly appealing mutual notes. In On the embroidered waves of memory, 1985-1991, painting interprets culpture again. A statue comes off the pedestal and falls into the Venetian lagoon for a date with the moon that inside water reflects the Byzantine craters of the cathedral. With a kind of divertissement the artist tries to open the figure to new echoes, making it assume the characteristics of naturalist and imaginary referentiality. In this authentic investigation beyond reality the figure doesn't lose, thanks to a highly refined work, the shining and precious effects of an extraordinary formal charm. The moon, that is one of the main themes,becomes a place of classical fancies and endless illusions and gives back unaltered the ancient humanity of its most clear emotional memories. The technique of temporal and geographical transposition is based on the surprises of the tale, on the essential themes of a story that is enriched inside the painting, expanding the echoes of an event in larger terms. The work is organized around the priority of a fact that is vividly represented while it takes place with heterogeneous constructions and the interlacing of religious, historical and sentimental themes.
The Byzantine,1985-1992, proves to be, in the techniques filtering the "devious" nature of the character and the misunderstandings words may originate, a sum of experiences realized in a single work. A painting that arises from the artist's visit to St. Cristopher in St.John's and Paul's church. To the severe face of a Byzantine statue is opposed the almost ironic unconventionality of the child who doesn't want to be guided. The saint is the legendary martyr (during the Middle Ages he was venerated as the patron against the plague) who, having put his fine physique at the service of those who had to cross a river without bridges during a stormy night with the risk of flood, helped a mysterious child. To Mazzieri St. Cristopher looks like a loving father who comes to fetch his child and takes him back home. A cheeky boy, looking like an angel, who doesn't like being guided by his father, because he thinks he can overcome the obstacle of the water alone. The artist also draws on a fourteenth-century tomb sculpture, embedded near the church of St. Simeon the Great. In Mazzieri's works there are the statuesque characters who take advantage of the night to have a busier life and to be the masters of the place. Covered with emotional values and mysterious appeals, they make the artist's loneliness less sad.
The common theme of all the Venetian production is the emotional evaluation of the town landscape and of its "inhabitants" that a great variety of colours fixes in clear images able to arouse emotions and affections of prolonged amazement, also when the representation is ironic and amplifies reality to its paradox. And The night lyrics,1985-1992, is conceived with a lyrical tissue surely modulated among very fine echoes and listenings. Here a moon with a human face lets itself rock in a gondola during a romantic trip taking place in an atmoshere of absolute musicality with extremely light tones. A young and ingenuous moon that, in its human features, brings the memory of ancient myths and the anxious desire of a lover. Not too far the church tower, turning into a human figure, seems to grasp the moon, the true one, so that she can show, just for a moment, its happy wandering in the sky. The work, full of compositive values of soft and simple elegance, seems magically full of an archetypal pureness and of an untouched time where the gondolier's labour, with his ever-repeated movements, seems to recall the odd hero Albert Camus recognises in Sisyphus's myth.
The grace of snow in St. Mark's, 1985-1995, originates, with subtle and refined sensitivity, in an enchanting process. The moon takes pictures of a child "made of light". On exposure in the large square with a pigeon in his hand, he looks like a hunting angel, a sort of Cupid. The scene underlines the vital and irrepressible strength of love and the magic character of the fairy spell and enchantment and it's veiled by tenderness. Narration takes place with an elegant and fluent style and the colour makes us dream because it constructs scenes that are caught each time in their uniqueness and variety.
All the works belonging to the Venetian period show a clear example of method: from the contemplation of a place,the architecture, a sculpture or a painting the artist passes to images of sublime memory, always full of the sense of history and life. In a dream of contemplation and reflection a constant cross-reference takes place: among the things that are near and the ones that are far found again under different proportions and aspects. So art discovers a system of ideal relations between realities that, subjected to an ecology of the mind and never stolen from measure, become symbolic. Mazzieri, with eyes wide shut, can exploit, with curiosity and simultaneously,all the visual chances Venice is offering him and from which he gets his references, breaking at least immediate appearances. Reality that is led to a kind of amplification, to a controlled freedom, though with fanciful and sometimes weird digressions. The scenes are almost all at night, because the artist loves discovering, in the late evening, the fairy fascinating and mysterious environments where to put his characters. Furthermore it's at night that the most extraordinary trips can be made. And through the constant inventive skill and the renewing of situations painting gets more and more limpidness and firmness, safe from any danger of aesthetism. Aspects of completeness sign the particular refinement Mazzieri has reached during the years, with a painting of vitalist brightness which can catch the glimpse of uneasiness that inVenice is everywhere and that strengthens the works of Venetian artists like Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto.Processes of masterly execution and of careful filtering of the place visual culture refer to an extremely educated and refined atmosphere you breathe in Venice during the last years too. The 1984 Biennial Exhibition is concentrated on Art and Arts- Newsreel and History and the manager Maurizio Calvesi writes that "the avantgarde dies undoubtly as a utopia and a violent research of the new, but it's handed down through the heritage of languages…". And the department Arts in the Mirror develops the theme of the art "reflecting" itself, looking back at its past and reinterpreting the masterpieces of ancient masters-Renaissance and modern- through the"d'après" and the "remake", the re-examination by the reproductive means, the reproduction and conceptual analysis, the "disguise", the remembrance or the free reinvention… In the "new painting" the use of quotations takes different forms: confusing, straying,fanciful or vitalist. Mazzieri can't ignore all this, not only because he is in Venice, but also because of his constant curiosity that has always given life to his research. But he refuses the term "quotationism" because, as he says during an interview ("Il Giornale",22nd July 1985) he feels he is "out" of all contemporary artistic "factions". His research moves inside a unique kind of reinvention of what Venice suggests him, Venice that is silent, nightly, inhabited by art-works and statues and rich in past history.
In his new works Mazzieri finds again, through direct contact, the meaning of the masterpieces he knew in the past, but not in their right value. The references are linked to St. Cristopher by Stefano Veneziano and above all, to the saint who plays the role of a politician by Giovanni Bellini; to St. George by Carpaccio in the Chiesa di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni and to the painting by Mantegna at the Academy Gallery. His interest in frescoes, he investigates even in the smallest details, leads him to represent figures from the bottom upwards and to "carry" them on the canvas, where they are suspended in a vertical development and in increasing dimensions. Moreover, the architecture so different from that of other towns stimulates him to a compositive rigour. Venice is "fit" -the artist says- for inspiring a painting like mine made of silences, constant almost repetitive rhythms. It's difficult to interpret it because Venice self-contains a synthesis, an artistic and poetic result. It's almost a surreal town. The rigour and the lay-out of the painting have changed if compared to the past. Figures are closer to everyday reality because they live in recognizable town foreshortenings. However an "oneiric" dimension is still present in the sense that the statue-like characters- live a free life, out of the limits by which they are usually bound".
In moving scenes, in hazardous matchings, in a creative process of constant gemmation , his figures still run through the artist's "wandering night", losing the characteristics of the disturbing "monsters" of the past to reach a dimension of a positive fairy-tale, in a sort of ironic astonishment, in an attitude of sympathy towards Venetian life where the artist, with great sensitivity, grasps the most beautiful lights and colours with a fantastic elegance.
It's like a search for innocence in a purifying place. A search that , open to the unexpected,the unusual and surprise, continues today.

critical anthology

walter mac mazzieri