critical anthology

walter mac mazzieri

"WALTER MAC MAZZIERI was born on April 15th 1947 at Cà d'Olina near Pavullo (Modena), a small Medieval village in the Scoltenna valley opposite mount Cimone.
Together with his father, Luigi Mazzieri, maimed of the right arm in Greece during 1940/45 war, his mother, Armida Mammei, and his brother Piero, he has a poor but peaceful youth often spent with animals, especially horses, necessary to carry wood and milk, which were a small help to the family.
His elder brother studies in a seminary at Fiumalbo (Modena), whereas Walter attends, already seriously short-sighted, primary school at Olina.
These are busy years with all the troubles of poor families, but marked by good experiences,like the river flowing, fishing, games in the wood, animals and wayfarers who come and drink some wine in the small tavern-room next to the kitchen in the evening.
In those years Mazzieri doesn't see any cars, he doesn't know them, at home he hasn't got electric light or water, he lives his early childhood isolated in the valley.
Only later, with the departure from the village, he becomes aware of the small world he grew in and of the poor conditions of his parents."
These lines constitute the short introduction to a biographical note Mazzieri wrote almost secretly: it's right to start from here because it would be otherwise difficult, perhaps impossible,to understand thoroughly the meaning of his painted production whose results are incredible (literally: beyond belief) especially the starting and central part of his work. Undoubtedly, he is a natural poet but completely free from any possible suspect of naifism, and surely because of that spontaneity his images evoke strong sensations even in non-acquainted, less educated or simple people. His painting can be read on different levels, from the elementary to the most complex one, from a direct to a complicated fruition with the most varied philosophical and psychoanalythical angles.
But first it's fundamental to assert that every quotation (among the most frequent ones are Mexican wall painting and some surrealist values) only belong to the culture of those who enunciate them and not to the artist's own culture. Mazzieri doesn't show off any culture other than the one he learnt thanks to an extraordinary poetic sensitivity which makes him unique and completely separate. His ability to evoke strong feelings is surely at the origin of the approval, often visceral, of his numerous followers. Preceeded by works of an expressionist stamp, the "core" of his poetics is already contained in "The bread", painted in 1964, when his precocious sensitivity made him conscious of the tragic isolation he was condemned to by living plunged in the wonderful, but often poor nature of Cà d'Olina. This boy with some bread and an apple in his hands is Mazzieri's self-portrait, imprisoned like in a cell,who paints himself with the big hands of a peasant but with the eyes already expressing restlessness and a nagging thought. It may also depend upon his accurate 1965 experience, following a hard but instructive training as a copier of Flemish miniatures.
It's difficult to say which eagerness, which "shingles" have made the young Mazzieri
sit at his easel after hours and hours of lenticular work, but in those years he paints portraits like The needlewomen,1964,where it's already present the need to place images in an unusual way, even though inside a worn iconography: and the wonder for the painter's precocity grows.
A complex painting like The friends,1965, magnifies all these particular gifts. Here he paints himself with a group of people of his own age during a feast in a tavern. In the numerous paintings of this period it's evident the tendency to praise highly the rural world inside which the young boy is forming his personality. Peasants and lunatics are his only subject in 1966-67.
The artist's morbid sensitivity changes when he moves from Cà d'Olina- the village-Mazzieri claims- where the sun rises first in the whole Frignano and where, according to a curious but reliable survey, there's the highest percentage of odd people in Emilia (the painter seems to be proud of it)- to Pavullo, where tourism has brought a relative wealth.
But, by this time, legends and impressions enriching generously his dream-like sap are settled in him.
From that "pompier" way, he passes, abandoning the stress on tonality, to paintings in which cromatic lightings, the neat impasto and the marked, almost violent, expressionist stroke reveal the brutal awaking of a new dimension: the passage from enchanted nature and deep silences to the yelling characters of the mountain society in Pavullo's taverns and square , to the celebration of the discovery of a deep interiority of even the simplest gestures. In Pavullo these sun-burnt and extraordinarily portrayed faces, these hard peasant features find an insuperable singer in Gino Covili.
But Mazzieri records roughness without love, distorts faces in what should be witticism and ends up in accusation, impatience of ignorance, condemnation of a loathsome state of mind and pure materiality: he's already an unsatisfied and disgusted observer of human nature. In theory, he will already take shelter in an enchanted world where there's no place for the gravity of human troubles even though the intrusions of these appearances have a considerable weight.
For a long time he portrayed the peasants' faces at the tavern,their days, their laughters and fights, but the tendency to get rid of the appearances of everyday life became urgent as soon as he realized that describing them wasn't enough, it was necessary to judge, to become aware, to choose an attitude and to take sides. Mazzieri has the sensitivity of a contemplative man who constantly reckons with himself before judging or taking sides.
Mazzieri's location is difficult and vain are the attempts to associate him with some particular experience even though someone thinks that thousands are the trickles feeding the river of his poetics.
It must be clear that Mazzieri isn't an uneducated painter: he visited the most important museums in the world, he travelled a lot mostly in the East and used to read refined texts. But nevertheless all these interests were aroused long after his pictorial erudition and together with his conversion to visionary expression.
One could formulate less usual and more precise hypotheses like the one of neo-humanism, thus placing the painter in the right perspective: Pavullo's hills with all the magic and faboulous hinterland of his chilhood spent in communion with nature, his golden, glorious, contemplative and pantheistic chilhood. The loved and hated nature from which Mazzieri often flees to plunge enthusiastically into cities, in short and hard trips from which he gets profitable comparisons, but what he remembers is a glimpse of a face half-seen in an underground or a peasant's story.

A marvellous precocity

His main experience is life in the mountains, hardened by the precocious idea that people must work to live, mythicising an existence as cheerful as can be: that of a child who enjoys complete freedom in nature, in a society where unforgettable and impressing facts never happen. Mazzieri's memories are strangely clear. The games are poor games which stimulate at most imagination.He enjoys himself playing with stones and dirt. This contact will mark him forever, together with his first mates: animals and old people of his small community. The old, maladjusted to the hard country life, used to tell little Mazzieri stories they had learnt from their grandparents and which had already achieved the dimension of a myth. These were true stories, full of mystery and wonder, gone from mouth to mouth during the long summer evenings, when families gathered and talked out of the door. They knew stories endlessly: about tramps, beggars and commuters. In fact Olina is still considered home of strange, maladjusted, odd and misanthropic people, and every now and then, madness bursts off.Mazzieri imprinted their faces, their rough hands, their wrinkles, their country clothes and the piercing excitement of their eyes well on his mind. And they had transmitted him the burning itch to see beyond the valley, to discover new worlds and the sense of life drama, which, through their stories, highlighted as a confused sensation, love and hate for mankind and the fundamental fear of contact with other people that will show later in young Mazzieri.
He left Olina at ten and in Pavullo his unsociable character had to adapt to small restrictions unknown to him.The park keeper had to explain him he couldn't get wood by cutting down a tree shading a bench on which vacationers used to sit in Summer.He went on living a day to day poor peasant life in the fields, taking care of some horses:the same life led by his parents and his elder brother. He was slowly fitting into the more active community of Pavullo, collecting several jobs. He worked as a shop boy, a purchase-distributor for dealers and a dishwasher; in the meanwhile he attended school: the same sacrifices of other poor students.
He already used to paint with such results that his parents, despite of their social conditions, with sensitive and foreseen intuition, decided to enrol him at the art institute "Venturi" in Modena, where he started to go regularly. But this experience revealed negative.At the institute he was a bewildered student, at home he couln't adapt to peasant life any more: therefore, with his parents' agreement, who were worried about the sudden cruelty of the themes he was painting, he interrupted school and shortly after started to work in an artisan workshop where wooden and iron ornaments were made. He worked here for one year till the workshop was transformed in an experimental school for craftsmen. He went on working there and for two years, from 1964 to 1966, he grew more refined in all kinds of materials as an iron, wood and stone sculptor.
At the same time paid by a local craftsman, he made very careful copies of sixteenth century miniatures which strained his sight badly, but refined him even more in the traditional technique of oil painting.
After these experiences, the artist got a craftsman diploma and started to accept occasional works of different kinds on his own. This is the period of the fellowship with Davide Scarabelli, a very active young sculptor with a highly extrovert personality and with another sculptor from Pavullo, the dreaming Raffaele Biochini who was his favourite friend. Modena, Pavullo and its surroundings are full of decorative works like bass-rilieves, posters, sculptures, signs and iron bars made together with his mates or on his own. With the proceeds of these works, the three boys went on trips: this was their favourite activity for years and years.
In 1965 Mazzieri visited France, Spain and the Balearic Islands. In 1966 Sweden, Denmark and Germany.In 1967 he went to Paris and then to London. In 1968 he visited Netherlands, Finland, Norway and Spain. In 1969 he went south: Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. He was very excited by this last trip.
In 1970 the painter travelled through Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia. These were not the trips of a usual tourist looking for sensations, but he travelled by several means of transport, also on foot or hitch-hiking, gaining a deep and direct knowledge and learning about the social and cultural conditions of the countries he was crossing. He wasn't seeking inspiration for his canvas. By this time his production was already running on independent rails which used only indirectly his personal experiences.
From each trip he takes back one or two prose poems.Some have a title, but most of them carry only the date of the year to distinguish them. Here you'll discover a poetic nature extraordinarily rich of density and depth which are not lowered by naivety and exaggerated lyricism but on the contrary enriched by them: the same that happens in Mazzieri's painting which gets evocative power and deep sensations from what would make the work of any other painter sentimental.
Evocative power he himself shows in his poetic, fascinating, mostly unintelligible titles which never identify images or help decoding: being almost always hermetic they can't explain the meaning of the representation.

The erotism of loneliness

The turgidness of figures in Mazzieri's representations is an erotic element. Also beyond hints and evident references of clear sexual line in some of his works, the turgid fullness of every element- trees, houses, animals, draperies and limbs of human figures- suggests a sensation of physical, sensual growth- not at all metaphysical- and it's a solar-type erotism, which contrasts with the lunar aspect of characters and athmospheres at night or before dawn enveloping the spaces of his imagination.
The phallus shape appears endlessly, as a flower brutally wielded, almost a weapon, a sceptre, an odd wind instrument, a horse-neck coming out of the horseman or under less explicit disguise in every painting; like a male member grasped by contracted hands in an onanistic act, which represents a symbol of man's solitude, of incommunicability, of an eros burning in tragic loneliness.
In Mazzieri erotism is a rural entity deriving from the relationship with nature, from the peculiar quality of a difficult coexistence of the mountain dweller with the deeply loved land. The swollen figures, blocked at an extreme tension, express this sensation which is, among the intuitions of his existential poetics, the most important one and so inward his ways of expression that the several imitators can't reproduce because it's the core of his painting, manneristic from the beginning, with its titanism and its fascinating teratology.
At the beginning of the seventies this peculiarity revealed itself in some autobiographical paintings, like"The sad tale of men" where a horseman weilds a tulip-phallus-spear and carries a quiver with similar darts, riding a dog (Breton, a boxer that was the painter's friend), in the "Puppet theatre of the dwarf flute" in which two odd musicians blow into phallus-like instruments, in the "Puppet theatre of the dwarf flute", in the marvellous "The nervous guards of instinct" representing a riotous scene of assault with aculeous-tongues among extravagant metamorphic beings or in the"Puppet theatre of pink desire" where mount and rider melt in one body which is doubly phallic and of a hybrid anathomy; a painting whose formal structure refers to the figures of Romanic parish churches.
Several titles of Mazzieri's paintings are taken from his poems confirming an awareness of the unity of his own painting with literary exploits. It seems as if his poems constitute a kind of intimate plan for his painting work: a warehouse of sensations and ideas to put on canvas. It's revealing: a lot of famous imaginative painters are writers too, like Blake or Kubin, Savino and Italo Cremona considered literary and pictorial geniuses at the same time.
An extensive examination of these data is worth trying because perhaps the most surprising aspect in Mazzieri's painting is that, after achieving the most useful maturity of his technical skills, the artist didn't evolve trying new researches or investigating other expressive possibilities. Despite his precocity which marks his pictorial language, he sticked to it. This would be scarcely consistent with his lively intelligence if we didn't consider the peculiar awareness of his childhood and youth which find a consequence and a prosecution in his middle age as the assessment of the deepest aspects of psyche. Mazzieri remained bound to dreamtime: he is like an adult Peter Pan, sweetly cantankerous and kindly misanthrope.All these elements are inside his paintings: from the iconography of his imagination to the qualities of his technique.
Moreover he isn't fossilized again and again in a style that makes him unique. On the contrary in his work different periods and particular phases can be clearly distinguished especially when certain shades of colour are dominant or the gestural character of his pictorial stroke changes.

The dream-like imaginary world

With the "Recovery of the Imaginary" in 1963, a series of celebrations dedicated to Surrealism took place. Monographic exibitions of "historic" masters, exibitions in which the surrealist presence was predominant like those held in Aquila ("Present Alternatives 3", 1968) organized by Enrico Crispolti, and first of all, Luigi Carluccio's " The Disturbing Muses", 1968, fostered the natural spur towards the Imaginary of most of the neo-figurative artists. In the catalogue of that unforgettable exhibition Carluccio wrote:" It's right to think that every time the artists feel the need to challenge the world they are living in, every time they feel the need to claim their right to be completely free and to remake, that is to think of the world as they like, they will get necessarily closer to the irrational experiences of Surrealism; they will take the same route, from the anarchist beginnings to the ludic satisfactions and the frantic plans and they'll try to unite life and art in just one thing. If this is really the time of challenge, Surrealism will conquer a lot of new preferences because it represents the most complex, extensive and lasting case of protest".
Moreover at that time Modena was regularly visited by the editorial staff of "Malebolge" which were almost all in favour of Surrealism in literature and connected to a group of neo-Dadaists and neo-Surrealists who were very active in Modena. At that period the avant-garde from Modena could have marked a particular situation in Italy (we are in 1965/66), but - as it often happens in small towns- the achievements of the protagonists were followed by a distracting diaspora that moved them away from places and cultural premises. Mazzieri, at the time, was lost in the hills of Frignano and didn't have any contact with Modena. He was converted later to Imaginary, when he visited "The disturbing muses" in Tourin.
Apparently he seems to avoid carefully the usual themes of contemporaneity. The consumer society, social tensions, the alienating relationship between man and technology, very popular themes in the years of his training, seem to have found in him an agnostic. Nor he was mixed up in the game of formalisms and researches which very often go off the ground of deep existencial meanings.
And Mazzieri tackles them to the root, inside man who creates and fights them. For those who don't want to be distracted by an intimate and open dialogue or by everlasting themes- love, hate, life, death- and express themselves in a language at last acquired by the middle mass culture as an imaginative chosen element, undoubtedly their attention is not directed to the form. In this meaning it's necessary to underline the implicit morality in Mazzieri's painting that is totally evident in his authentic "poverty" free from games and technical heights. It's essential, without affectedness except a poetic colour modulated with extreme imagination, raw and well-constructed without affectations. From his stroke neurosis or alienations, stresses or nightmares don't come out: what emerges is an intact, dramatic, spiritual vitality. That's why it's better to talk of neo-humanism, explaining that it's not a decadent painting,even though a superficial observer could get this impression and the imaginary background in these canvas is summed up in symbols so that oneirism, which seems to fill them, is reduced to the minimum.
Good erotic painting: easy and full of gists.You can find there enchanted and joyful naif moments; the gloomy and mysterious fables of symbolist painters, from Redon onwards; the chilling and provoking surrealist creation. But the artist's absolute poetic and imaginative freedom is certain, so these quotations must be confined to the philological assumption.
The cultural isolation, only occasionally interrupted, that could have made him just one of the several overambitious "local painters", has on the contrary developed a neoromantic-symbolist poetics, enriched by an indirect expressionist interference dating back to his debut.It connotes images emotionally and places them in a poetical space which is not neatly defined: between romantic and ideological day-dreams. The iconography would make think of a consistent influence of manierism ( in perspective distortions of hands and feet, that have here a symbolic value), deriving from his own juvenile paintings.

Just one master: the museum

But the ideal museum, Mazzieri made up during his trips, has awakened first of all his Emilian nature and often, while observing the instinctive creating of large masses, the kindlings of light that poke emerging glows of warm colour in his paintings, the thought goes on the analogy to the figurative machineries by Guercino, to the age of Carraccio, inside which Parmigianino's exausted elegance lives together with Hannibal's rough daily life: in that period the invention of colour ran together with the supreme balances of Renaissance representation. That was an art first of religious inspiration and secondly of mythological inspiration. Such opinions about Mazzieri's work seems to be right because his figures reveal themselves in a pagan sacredness.
To remove every doubt about the explicit reference to the ancient art, first of all Emilian art, it's not necessary a particular critic discernment. It's easy to notice, for example, the evident connection between paintings like "Grey fancies of a night horseman", 1970, and "St George and the dragon" by Dosso Dossi in Dresda between "Among the round and smoothed pebbles",1972, and "Giving Autumn leaves" or between "The deep ceramics of desire" and Primaticcio's"Ulysses and Penelope" in Toledo. Moreover it's not necessary to remember that representations like the metope called "of the imaginary scene" in Modena Cathedral, which are widespread in all Romanic art, like the ones of griffins and chimeras bearing the columns in portals, can be quoted as exempla for paintings like "In emperors' hand the soldiers' red clove pink goes on blossoming", 1971, "Clouds breathe rigourously" or "The man from Magrignana",1972. Also the distortions of horse figures or their colour, can be connected to Parmigianino's "St.Paul's conversion" in Vienna. These possibilities of comparison, quoted willingly at random because in Mazzieri's work they appear without any order of quality or history, are proper in order to illustrate the artist's cultural itinerary. Moreover they are useful, not only to establish a direct influence of ancient times on his images, but also to demonstrate that, following his own emotion, the painter can't avoid- if he doesn't want to- the flow back of aestethic ancestrality of his own Emilian cultural support; magniloquence and sensationalistic emphasis can be associated to the "Deposition" by Niccolò dall'Arca; the sturdiness and hard swelling of his characters and objects can evoke Correggio and his cathedral dome in Parma with the plasticity of the clouds which look like a solid material to which angels and saints cling and "physically" lean against. And it's proper to consider the physicalness of Mazzieri's imagination, because his creativity is materialistic and his figures are solid ghosts. The rough terrestrial characteristic of his buildings could recall "The merry brigade" by Passerotti as far as the "athmosphere" is concerned and not as a direct quotation; unless it's explicit like between "Country portrait", 1977, and "The bean-eater" by Annibale Carracci in Rome. Everything is based on the static Romanic solidity of mountain parish churches.
It's like a global look on ancient art, with Emilian sensitivity, coming back to his first experiences and we mustn't forget he formed himself as a copier reducing classical works to miniatures for an artisan workshop.
But of course Mazzieri was influenced mainly by neo-romantic and symbolist painting. Figures like the sitting and annoyed questioner of "A garden of crying fireflies", 1968, are suggested by Heinrich Fussli- how many times this painter represents meditative figures holding their head in their fists- and by De Chirico's "The philosopher and the poet",1914. Of course some likenesses can be attributed to a poetical affinity which is not at all a chance.

Tales of dreams and visions

When an independent position is consciously taken up without caring about critical comments and without any self-interest, it has a possibility to evolve autonomously, becoming thus a case.
The trends of unconscious follow odd routes to come to the surface. It's very often almost impossible to define the origin of symbologies and analogies that imaginary painters use in order to create their images. A psychoanalitical critic would be useful but not always effective to identify these mind processes. Symbols are images which mask meanings enigmatically hinted. With regard to this aspect, a few artists, more than Mazzieri, feel instinctively the need to transform the deep meaning of their paintings into symbols: because the confession he wants to express is really intimate. His works are fascinating but sometimes inscrutable because they originate from uncommon thoughts or experiences, and it's necessary to remember that most of them were painted by an artist who was not yet twenty. Freud wrote about dreams: "The unconscious takes advantage of suppression and night relaxation to make use of material run up during the day to form impossible dreams" and he adds that dreams " are here to express sexual desires". In fact they are projections of libido that is, according to Freud, "the energy the ego dedicates to the objects of his sexual tendencies". And paradoxically Mazzieri has the same "sexual" tendencies towards the entire nature and every object stimulating his curiousity or originating an idea. It's a kind of erotic possession of the visible idealised and transformed by the unconscious. It's a common tradition analysing with extracritical methods the artists who create imaginary or odd representations and expressing comments revealing the unconscious meaning of iconography.
Moreover the art critic often lacks in deep knowledge outside his specific field and it happens that each critic judges a work using his own culture often applied to artists who, in spite of the appearances, don't lend themselves to particular readings sticking to their works like pleonastic or misleading labels.
As far as Mazzieri's painting is concerned, it's clear that only part of his symbols belong to the collective imaginary, but it must be stated that the process of the visionary version of everyday life he practises, is produced by the subjective imaginary. Psychology is the least proper way to understand Mazzieri's painting which is made poor if coldly approached because it's an art to be enjoyed through the piercing emotions it can arouse. In fact it's an antihistorical and anachronistic painting and it doesn't intervene on characters or directly on events that inspire it. Even if it's narrative, its images originate from dreams: thoughts, desire of facts,characters, situations rotating around events and ideas: the narration of events which have never happened because they are inside our own mind and move inside our body; images which belong to the spiritual experience and to the cultural existence, which form his intimate mental diary. To feel the extraordinary empathy every watcher feels, it's necessary to accept the idea that "paintings are made by the watcher too", that is to say accept the dialogue through our experience, sensitivity and culture. The ambiguous strength of these paintings works as a catalyst leading the subjective imaginative power towards a different interpretation. If Mazzieri's paintings transmit to each of us different sensations and messages, this is the warrant of the possibility for his works to last for a long time and not to undergo the unsteady taste and the passing cultural trends: now or in the future, someone will always find himself represented somehow in these paintings, as it happens in real poets' work.
But it's also known that a painting is not only the expression of the unconscious: "Only in art it happens that a man obsessioned by his desires makes something which is similar to their satisfaction and that, thanks to the illusion of art, this game arouses the same emotional reactions an authentic satisfaction would arouse". And Freud adds:" The true artist can do more. He can give his dreams a shape which makes them lose every personal characteristic unacceptable for other people and which makes it in such a way to transmit joy to them". It can't be denied that this "joy" in Mazzieri's painting is shared by a lot of people and that the nature of his art falls in this sphere as it tries to make his dreams come true and this fact is clear to everybody. For example his characters absorbed in long dialogues, looking into each other's eyes, with the doves marking the first part of his imaginary production, these men -landscape,men-mountain, faces-tree, try to express a pantheistic possession of universal sensations, a sensory identification with the thing which somehow realizes Mazzieri's dream: disintegrating in a total hug of the perceptible things. It's the representation of his libido and it mediates the "unavowable" message of his love for life. But expressing through symbols opens, for him too, the perspective of ambiguity. A symbol is in its own nature shifty, ambiguous and multi-purpose. The contradiction to which the use of symbols leads is rarely accepted by European mentality, but in the East -for example- the idea that the "soul" contains the opposites of every human possibilities, either in the noblest spiritual hights or in the lowest material wickednesses, is wisely accepted by philosophy, religion and customs. In the western world a symbol may have just one group of meanings. Mazzieri breaks this rule. The lack of a critical identification of contradictions in his painting would lead to evaluation mistakes.

The imaginary everyday life

For too long the artist has been merely considered as an isolated, exclusive separate entity.
On the contrary it must be constantly considered that, even if a painter is confined, geographically or for his spiritual attitude, in the most secret solitude, he can't avoid expressing and representing in his work his surrounding and his age in a more or less evident way. That's why for Mazzieri, isolated and without any cultural contacts or exchanges with other painters, it was enough "to feel" that his expressive criterion should use imaginary expression resolutely. It wasn't a conversion on the way to Damascus but the logic conclusion of a process already started with the distorted representation of the faces of mad people or mountain-dwellers whose glance was searching "something else". And undoubtedly, from a technical point of view, the boy who at ten tried to mix oil colours and water - so poor was his technical knowledge- but who in 1967 had his first successful personal exhibition, must have felt a violent emotion while looking at the polished surfaces in symbolist and surrealist paintings and the great articulating of oneiric mechanisms. In fact from then on, his painting will be visionary, but, above all, his technique will be personalized in an unarrestable and unique way and he will abandon the expressionist violence, the rough stroke and the primary colours with fauves alterations. Also surrealist painters took elements from the late 18th century symbolism and from Metaphysics by Giorgio de Chirico. But "monsters" like Mazzieri's can be found in lay Renaissance painting which was influenced by Greek and Roman mythological representations. Perhaps placing him at the borders of Surrealism is a rough and superficial evaluation. Nevertheless, as far as the symbolic meaningfulness of images is concerned, it's right to think that not all inventive processes adopted are perfectly conscious. But also the pictorial technique is influenced by emotionality and by casual events. He must be seen as an imaginary painter first of all for his colour invention, his extraordinary cromatic changebleness in each painting, the vibrating transfiguration of tones on all the surface of the painting and the phantasmagoric originality of matching; the carnal sensuality and the plastic effects he gets from the glowing brightness of colours constitute the strength and the charm of his canvas.
The expressions of Mazzieri's characters waver between a grumpy, hard brutality and an immense sweetness, between an aerial mildness and a telluric roughness. Their hands are like vices in the act of gripping, grasping and holding; their eyes are like imploring and bewildered lukewarm lakes dripping very clear and precious liquids; the sad eyes of a violent and raped person. The whole gamut of emotions finds its own image in symbols and every image finds its own symbol. There's no choice for good or evil and for positive or negative characters because negative and positive, right and wrong live together in nature. Every figure is plunged in an ambiguous expression; all of them have a monumental solemnity in common, with a figurative and sphinx-like fixity in front of which everyone is filled with dismay as when you consider the total concepts of philosophy. The ugly faces blowing into unknown phallus-like musical instruments belong to the visions of the people; they are not different from the masks that- perhaps with apotropaic purposes- Rinascimental architects and their Baroque successors put on the archs of portals and whose construction was given to unknown stone-cutters who let their fancies go. Crying, fight,loneliness, abuse and meditation are the most evident themes in Mazzieri's painting. This Baroque mannerism, more and more manifest, reaches its climax in " Olindo's odyssey",1975, which demonstrates how, during his uncomfortable journeys in the museums around the world, he has absorbed the creative skill, the solemnity and the structural quality of the great figurative frames of the past centuries.
Unintentional similarities with lots of the great giant painters from Siqueiros to Savinio were quoted but only because these masters dwelt upon Michelangelesque mannerism. And Michelangelesque elements can be found in the powerful construction of paintings like "The red moon doesn't kill the deep ceramics of desire", 1972. Probably unwillingly because the discovery of Michelangelo's colour dates to the late eighties; therefore it could be stated that Mazzieri sensed the shot colours that wonder so much and now explain the marvellous cromatism of the mannerists, successors of the Sistina genius. On the contrary the short academic studies he was obliged to start (artists are generally prevented from studying and not vice versa!) and which were soon interrupted because of the results and a depressed state provoked by the academic routine, reflect undoubtedly on his work but are not significant. Love for nature and things is so rooted in Mazzieri to drive him to give his images a material aspect, so as to consider them as living elements of his daily routine.Through images he tries to draw a parallel with what he is, a dream-like diary to make a self-reference and also because each definition produces other introspective possibilities, a work takes origin from another and leads his life, day after day.
Art is for Mazzieri a vital need but this doesn't priviledge or distinguish him. " If this is true for a man" writes René Huyghe, ("Dialogue with the Visible", Parenti, 1958, page.382)," it's the same for the people, for both of them art is of great importance. It's not only a way to make life beautiful, an ornament or a luxury, as somebody says, art is an answer to a deep need of mental life. No society could live without it".
The subject is proper because, with regard to the oneiric-fable-like themes of the painter from Pavullo, it would be easy to level the accusation of egocentricity and social "disangagement" in his work where introspection and indifference for the "party" idea of politics are manifest. But this idea is widely present in Mazzieri under a strictly social point of view. If it wasn't, he couldn't be the poet of the people he in fact is, as confirmed by the success he obtains in all social classes. But the present art which has a real international "political" success is official, produced by our capitalist society, reproducible in series, good to be put on architectural decorations or for aestethic industrial solutions. That's why Mazzieri, though unique, is a popular artist, one among others. The internationally approved art is academic culture, persuasively induced by the cultural commercial power. It's an art which doesn't care about relations with masses and which sometimes covers itself with nihilism and indifference by virtue of a" leftist overcoming the artistic need", thus denying it revolutionary possibilities and incidents. Ernest Fischer writes:" An art which arrogantly ignores the needs of masses and boasts of being understood by a few people, leaves the mud of fun business free range. If the artist avoids social relations, the public will be fed on the wastes of the barbaric production for masses". (E. Fischer, "Is art necessary?", Editori Riuniti, 1962, page.106).On the other side stand political artists, those who thought to have a role in developing the Country politics with their artistic works.
The painter he admires most is Max Ernst in "The bride dressing", 1940. If we carefully examine this preference, we find that this is a coherent choice, whose influences are evident in his most visionary paintings.

A hybrid culture

Several of Mazzieri's critics have often considered his painting as surrealist or very close to surrealism. Even though there's a relation with some figurative surrealist painters, in Mazzieri the oneiric aspect is not essential, and therefore not so decisive to trace his work back to the Bretonian poetics which finds its meaning in oneirism and irrationalism. In his paintings the use of symbols and the connections with his past life have always a leading role and his imagination evokes transmorphic and polymorphic images that are part of the subconscious,but never of the unconscious. We can talk to these beings which are not at all frightful or repulsive; we seem to be acquainted with them: they are like ghosts originating from us and coming back to us. We are fascinated by them because their vision is like a deep glance into the Es, like detecting feelings and resentments which are indefinable but perfectly recognizable. These representations are archetypes of imagination that lead the history of man and his figurative art. Mazzieri has rediscovered them in Eastern and Egyptian art, in the metopes of Modena Cathedral, in the Roman churches of Frignano, in the ancient paintings of the great museums he visited, in the Romantic and symbolist works he loves so much and finally in Surrealist art. If we look carefully they are still the fauns, the centaurs, the sphynxes and the chimeras. He and his past life constitute the entity around which the images of his paintings turn, with the burden of the past, the anxiety for the future, his own hypersensitivity and his kind-heartedness that makes him so vulnerable to be able to create works of art on thoughts and sensations or on details other people can't grasp. His works represent the trips of his mind, the burden of loneliness, the social relation and the oppression of the bonds of affection and love that make him lose his freedom.For this reason his characters have, almost always, the eyes lost in the infinite space and carry their house,their village, their town on their back, as damned Sysiphus carries his rock; they have loving, snarling or bothersome animals on their shoulders or on their heads. ("Poem of wind and sacrifice",1968; "A thousand tired clocks",1969; "Kind dew coming back",1980).
Mazzieri believes that staying alone is a way to be free (See: R.Margonari,"Walter Mac Mazzieri", Artioli Editore, Modena, 1971, page 96) but nevertheless he cultivates relations,enduring friendships, familiar affections, trying to develop the several relationships at a level higher than the physical and usual one. He declares that he paints in order to "find new brothers" (F.Genitoni, The story of an artist; "Gazzetta di Modena",1984). His work is a mind trip inside which images occur: the way to narrate a short story that has as a subject what is impossible to describe in the author's life and thoughts. And the narrative dimension reveals itself clearly above all in the empathetic relationship that his paintings establish with the regarding element, a moment the artist willingly seeks through narrative iteration. Many of his paintings seem an episode of a wider preceding or following narration. It's like an invitation to a dialogue, every painting is expected to have a person to talk to or at least a watcher.
Placing Mazzieri's works in the field of contemporary researches is then perilous and problematic: doing it at any cost would reveal its gratuitousness to anyone. The uniqueness of this artist has been confirmed more than once and unanimously by all those who have commented his work seriously. He's an atypic case and in today's art these cases are rarer and rarer because of the artists' conformism and servilism towards manager-critics. Even if uniqueness were the only merit of this artist, this would be enough to put him in a very special Olympus among the few creators of poetic worlds holding creative obsession, very far from brigades, from platoons, from companies and regiments, far from the "zones" and out of the "lines", untouched by "currents" chosen by the majority. But of course he isn't an outsider in modern figurative issues. Paradoxically it can be stated that he lives them in a deeper way than those who boast their participation. But he looks at them with widened eyes, fixed over the image reflected by his soul, estimating them with his own visionary powers and transfiguration skills. He isn't worried about renovating his language because he has his own which, in his opinion, is the most suitable to express himself and he doesn't present his choice as a novelty, thus distinguishing himself from all those who remake with the impudence of beginners.
He's an ever-new painter because he's unique; he's original because he is alone.

The technique of anxiety

Author of cromatic preciosities, he alternates periods of soft colours and periods of sharp, bright colours. The stroke has been hardening since 1980 in the works that could be defined as "Olindo period", reaching a fixed point in "The hunter of pale clouds", 1983. In this and in the following paintings, Mazzieri goes back to the evocative power of the XIVth century painting of Ferrara. The captivating appeal of ancient art is confirmed by the works of the "Venetian period", carried out in a moment of loneliness, gloom and nostalgic regret spent in voluntary exile. Venice is seen like an inadequate architectural splendour, like a nightly and lunar apparition of dark theatrical wings outlined by the reflected light where, like enraptured bystanders, control the Madonnas and the saints of the anconas painted by the great artists in the "schools" of the lagoon churches ("The night of the tempting angel", 1985). The autobiographical meaning of this series is sometimes underlined by the titles which are strangely coherent with the images: the journey in search of himself ("Where are you taking me to die full moon", 1984), solitude and bewilderment ("The wave fisherman at Murano", 1984); the nostalgic dream ("Your daughter the moon", 1984). The immersion in the water city, still conditioned by the original culture ("The honey lagoon",1984), where the town on the head immersed in the canals in an unlikely Venice suggests the image of the many-towered Bologna and the moon is warm, belongs to a different reality, a friendly celestial body in a cold starlit universe.
A distracted glance to Mazzieri's entire operating span might suggest that, except the short period of his realist beginning ( but a very particular realism where Caravaggio and socialist neorealists are mixed), his expression wasn't marked by meaningful changes. In fact technical changes followed one upon the other not in a very evident way, but nevertheless meaningfully. If we compare the "Venetian period" and the paintings made to ward off the horror for the untimely death of his brotherly friend Raffaele Biolchini with the previous paintings, it's easy to find the stylistic difference gradually made concrete through a constant and sturdy investigation, a subterranean anxiety, a tension towards synthesis and a greater selectivity of shapes which were however present during the different phases of his work. Therefore someone might think he uses more refined technical procedures, nearer to those used by the masters the artist admires, but this is not true: they're different but not better procedures. Every period in Mazzieri's painting has been expressed with the technique he thought more consistent with the purpose of the moment: for example the stroke seems rough when the subject is the rediscovery of ancient painting, more convincing if there are references to surrealism.
In the first visionary works his technique corresponds to a widespread stress on tonality; in fact the colour is quite composite. The outlines of shapes are not demarcated even if the stroke is robust. The large and thick brushwork can be defined forming impasto roughness, too. These methods are clearly of Emilian tradition, in the archangelic meaning, although the themes and the poetic intention are by now uprooted from any regional notion and addressed to the wide international scene. Mazzieri's skill to get effects also from the laying of pictorial material reveals later with well elaborated characteristics. While at first the compositive structure was created like a cloth weaving, later the whole image is traced in his main lines with a strong colour, in a monochromatic way; on this background it grows gradually obtaining volumetries and chiaroscuro, thus gaining a rustic sense of the subject produced scraping the almost undipped paintbrush on the canvas: procedure which is quite right to describe the hirsuteness and roughness and matches the themes and subjects of that period. Later colours become brighter and -if possible- more vivid, more invented with very personal chromatic varieties.
Also shapes froze becoming hard and smoothed. The lunar brightness of his last works comes from the starting with Prussian blue on which the whole chromatic growth of the painting is based.
These different phases can be easily pointed out with a complete review going from his first works to the last ones. But the total image of the painter's work is monolithic: it seems that superimpositions, different curiosities, influences or aesthetic reflections other than the ones which started the incredible visionary saga of his tale, didn't add to his starting, marvellous maturity. And yet among his first and last works there's a substantial change which is represented by colours - a change in the field of pictorial language- colours that are now more "imaginary" than before, with tones set free from any naturalistic minute descriptive style of the subject. It's a particular colour, invented also as regards the chromatic name: that is to say a red which is not really red, a green not really green, but something more and different, not symbolically tied to the representation, a colour which is completely free.
It seems completely inexplicable, because it's part of art, that with this colour Mazzieri can give the quality of his figures and objects a greater force, that he can identify their souls better, that he can increase the already bursting violence of his images, that their expressiveness is better connoted and that the approach of different taste and culture is made easier. His choices reintroduce pictorial issues starting from the beginning and remaining in their own field. Mazzieri worked hard also in the graphic field and produced a lot of drawings, as a lithographer and an engraver,too. A lot of his print works were later hand-coloured. This demonstrates that in the artist's opinion the chromatic contribution is essential to express his feelings as if the drawing alone wasn't enough to communicate the meaning of the image. In fact in Mazzieri's drawings the synthetic naked soundness of the stroke is very evident, strongly demarcated and so fluent that you can see the artist drawing and constitutes a mere rhythmic pleasure for the gestural expressiveness that shows the image as if it flew from a mysterious force, for which the author's hand is only a change carrier without any premeditation. Mazzieri avoids chiaroscuro artifices; he confines himself to the neat drawing of the outline. Watching the drawings is essential to discover one of the most evident characteristics of his representations, and consequently of his painting, that's to say the essence, or at least the extreme rarefying, of straight lines. The persuasiveness of curved lines constitutes, in fact, the crucial point of the attraction of famous people and lower classes for his dramatic representations which on the contrary should cause different reactions. Disney's figuration comes to mind: in fact "Comicdom" and animation characters were willingly designed exaggerating the circular and spherical morphological characteristics; but of course this captious premeditation is not present in the painter's mortified and suffering meditations. It's an aspect that -already at an early sign stage- is evidence of kindness and lack of aggressiveness, in the contemplative but yet "physical" and sensual gloom of his images.

A systematical symbolism

Mazzieri's systematical symbolism is typical because the same symbols come again with the same meaning in many of his works, (this idea is expressed by Herbert Read in "Art and alienation", Mazzotta, Milan, 1969, when he speaks about Hieronimus Bosch). Another remark by Read can be added: the characters created by the artist from Pavullo don't represent individualities, but standard figures; in fact classifications may be criticized but it's sure he is a symbolist painter. To understand his message, the value of these symbols must be found because they are the essential Ariadne's thread in the interpretation of meanings. He isn't an "against" artist, but an artist who is crossed by the troubles of everyday life, a dreamer disturbed by anything that takes him away or distracts him from his poetic world: this gives a strong soundness to the appeal of his paintings which are acknowledged as images completely concentrated on emotions. "It's possible to go beyond the limits of nature, tear the dull covering surrounding us, cast our inspirations in an explosive way in the surrounding world so as to modify and subdue it in different ways. Trying to escape, creating an empty buffer between present ego and escaping ego, or better turncoat in other creatures of imagination or history (…). But going beyond the limits of nature means also going beyond its "present" and the idea of man, to find him again in dialogue and communication". These words by Luigi Carluccio (" The sacred and the profane in the art of symbolist painters", Tourin, 1969, page XVIII) could have been written for Mazzieri in the years when his pictorial personality strengthened. But in order to reach this goal,efficient tested and practical instruments are necessary. So Mazzieri created these image-instruments formed by recurrent ideas, representations with an established effect, made of evocative and stimulating colours that define their own function on empathic and appealing bases thus showing explicit and unambiguous purposes.Symbolic icons and colours to be reproduced in case of need well knowing their efficiency and functioning. They come again constantly, in different cycles and periods and we recognise them even though they are sometimes hidden or camouflaged.
Let's consider some surrealist examples (Magritte, Dalì): in their paintings the uninterrupted dismantlement and reassemblage of figurative elements suggest an additional operation in which the analogic inversion and the division of the addends give the same result if summed. This procedure willingly reifies every element of the image reducing it to the same emblematic value: the different association and the different succession suggest various readings, but the objective sense and the meaning don't change. On the contrary in Mazzieri, even when already seen characters and objects are represented, every relation between them changes. They seldom have an already played role. An example: the figure which often appears in his painting, the he-goat, has always different roles: from the cynical and pitiless raider to the wise counsellor (see in sequence: "The night is coming panting black";"Grey fancies of a night horseman"; "Mr Kafka"; "Clouds breathe rigorously"; "The deep ceramics of desire", 1970). And so the cat-dog, which appears between '70 and '72, changes into a dog-cat, from a guard carrying the weight of responsability- the castle on its back- ("Where my thought takes shelter",1970; "A lead and feathered tail", 1970; "The puppet theatre of the village cat",1972) to a witness of secret loving meetings ("In disguise so as the snakes didn't talk", 1971), where the he-cat disguised as a she-cat, tries to get rid of the weight of home and experience from his shoulders, while meeting a female partner, watched by careful cats and cautious trees. It's obvious that in his painting there's no relation with the surrealist irrational even though some characteristic elements of surrealistic imaginary -oneiric, macabre, erotic elements- are present.

Domestic monsters

In painting, the monstruous is almost always correlated to the imaginary and the wondrous and is often represented - as in Mazzieri's works- by original images, natural chaos, erotic freedom, senses prevailing reason, impossibility to control and mysterious strength of instincts. Gigantism and hyperbole, which are so often present in his paintings, conform to an idea of the monstruous that, for its erotic value, is strictly connected to nature and man. In fact the monstruous, being an exception to the "standard", is part of nature and,as it represents one of its wonders,it confirms any possible casual element as an inherent possibility, as a part at the border of the entire entity. In Mazzieri's images, terathological elements have a demonstrative function, an exemplifying function of instinctual release, going back to the origins of the relation between human and natural, erotic in the oldest meaning of the word. The painter from Pavullo is at ease in his imaginary reality, he identifies and represents himself in it, in the naturalness of the monstruous. Georges Canguilhelm writes ("The monstruousity and the wondrous", in "The knowledge of life",Bologna,1976)" Life doesn't break its laws or the plans governing structures". "Inside it events are not exceptions and in monstruousity there's nothing prodigious. There aren't exceptions in nature- the tarathologist says in the age of a positive tarathology.Nevertheless this positivist formula gets a concrete meaning only if connected to the meaning of an opposite rule, a rule excluded by science but applied by imagination: the rule that generates anticosmos, the chaos of exceptions without laws. This anti-world, when seen by those who, after creating it, regularly go there believing that inside it everything is possible- forgetting that only laws allow exceptions- this anti-world is the imaginary world, the dark vertigo of the monstruous". And Mazzieri's monsters originate from themselves, springing up from just one stock, turning upside down, getting together; and it's in the natural element of his anti-world -that exists only for the "true world"- that he can portray himself as a he-goat talking to a fellow creature of another colour (" Among the round and smoothed pebbles", 1970) or turn his dog into a winged and bird-headed mount so as to feel less the horseman weight and fly in the sky where clouds of bread stretch, or where, the animal with a wise human face, in the hug of the hands-forelegs, protects the house where his little daughter is with her toys and the green moon of hope, looking like a slice of a juicy fruit ("I remember a face to paint tulips",1977).
Those who observe the postures of characters in the complex representations by this painter often meet thoughtful figures grasping their heads, while others lean on their crossed arms. These are typical attitudes of a person who is absorbed in deep lonely thoughts or is taking an imaginary trip,fancying and dreaming. Everything happening around might be considered as the clear desplay of those thoughts and those dreams. These characters who live inside the lanscape and among the figures and shapes of his imagination, not unreal for those who dreamt them, spectators of their own imaginary, more aware of the reality of the dream than of the tangible reality, as when Calderòn's allocution is inverted: "Dream is life", among the symbols of loneliness, infinity and intimate feelings, like the snail, the egg and the tear.
Mazzieri changes even the smallest event of sensitive and spiritual life ( a listened tale, a glance, an occasional meeting, the meaning of a relation, an odd remark, an emotion, the result of a conversation) into a turgid, anguishing and Bretonian "convulsive" image, with a technique which is the brand of the real visionary painter. They are often stories of assaults, but only seldom of physical assaults, of magic spells, dialogues with animals or with historical facts dating back to High Middle Ages (mythical period); fears as the fear of the City seen as a many-sided,inscrutable and distant monolith and from which snarling monsters come out or wait for the incautious wayfarer ( "An absent ring of black orbits",1970; "On the smoothed way to the East",1972) near which sometimes come delicate mermaids made of the same City substance ("The butterflies neglected at the door",1971) or like a mysterious, threatening, incomprehensible silent urban area (" The moon on the minaret sword",1970). The process from which these visions generate derives from Mazzieri's lonely and empathic relation with the things and animals young Mazzieri believed he could talk to, cultivated in his childhood inside the stone walls of his native house lost in the Frignano mountains. It's a process, seemingly simple, that rouses piercing visions. For example:how much patience and suffering must the horse bear for the endless assault of the gadfly? And here's the representation of a skinny, consumed, exausted horse carrying on his back, like a terrible weight, a huge bloodthirsty insect, inserted into its flesh, like a shining jewel in a worm-eaten piece of wood ( "The buzzing of the gadfly",1968). In a following version the representation may have another meaning according to the artist's personal experience ("Poets destroy monuments scraping the clouds",1969).
It's a hyperbolic heightening, then, the magniloquent expression of the smallest events, weird thoughts, representations of what is imperceptible and occasional; but always meditative operations as it's suggested by the constant presence of thoughtful characters. The quality of "Imaginative Mazzieri"is of an intimist kind. Probably nowadays, more than in the past, the main difficulty for an artist is identifying and defining a logic technique for a personal poetic expression that can represent him in a universal way. A lot of painters try to obtain it choosing a single-theme image; others work out figural procedures qualified by particular technical qualities; others reproduce endlessly the same emotion or fit into the militants of trend theories of modern aesthetic thought; but there may be a lot of other ways too. But at last, it's now considered effective a solution obtained through more than one logic: eclectism doesn't cause scandal any longer and it isn't refused by critics or by the public. Nevertheless, with all these possibilities, making art and life correspond remains a hard uncertainty that must be solved every time because it's an individual matter and so it renews as many times as are the individuals who question themselves about it. Walter Mazzieri succeeded in achieving this exploring the outlines of his dilemma through just one logic, coherently followed. He is a unique, different and independent painter who carries out a circularity between experience and poetry, who asserts the vitality of feelings and follows the modern aspiration to man's harmony with himself.

critical anthology

walter mac mazzieri