critical anthology

walter mac mazzieri

Walter Mac Mazzieri was born in 1947 at Cà d'Olina , a place full of "odd" people, as the artist loves to say. His paintings, drawings and engravings are still a puzzle. The imaginary dominates inside them and fancy together with elements of oneiric origin and dream becomes, through the definition of symbols, the wall between reality and its opposite. With regard to this, Mazzieri is certainly one of the most unique cases in the young Italian painting.
When I referred to a puzzle, it was because in these days, two texts completely conflicting have been published. Franco Solmi, while presenting a portfolio of etchings by the Wiligelmo gallery in Modena, contradicts Renzo Margonari, who dedicated to the painter a long essay in a monograph containing also critical writings by Enrico Crispolti,Enzo Fabiani, Osvaldo Prandoni, Graziano Manni and poems written by Mazzieri himself. Shortly Solmi doesn't agree with the symbolist reading Margonari made with a strong philological rigour and, with reference in particular,to the golds of some paintings, he says that only symbolic elements are present. The distinction might appear captious or too fine but it isn't at all.
In the first case Mazzieri would be placed in a specific cultural situation, in the second case attention would be directed on his original expressiveness. These are two aspects that, in my opinion, may cohexist as, if now it's possible to place the artist in a specific position thanks to precise critical instruments, this doesn't mean that, even though his work is linked to cultural episodes and it's the result of information and study (these two terms must be understood in their right meaning) it isn't separated from a strong imaginative charge and an original invention (It couldn't be otherwise). However it's undeniable that his impressing characters, that dominate the silence of colours with gestures in slow motion and that, with their heavy and solid architectonical structure, give substance to empty spaces, are the means to evoke and investigate the most mysterious dimensions of the ego without any separation between the imaginative element and the deeply existential one.

critical anthology

walter mac mazzieri