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antologia critica | walter mac mazzieri | |||
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antologia critica | walter mac mazzieri | |||
THE MYSTIC EXPLORER OF THE NIGHT
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Walter Mac Mazzieri’s painting combines all the constituents that allow to define his artistic experience as “imaginative”. It’s necessary to add at once that the hypotheses of a specific surrealism are not convincing, even if the artist’s formal terms can, partly, make us think of some aspects of the movement that originated and developed in France. In
fact all his work lives deeply the relation with his past life, the reality
and the experience based on real things and history. “However that may be,
I paint- the artist from Pavullo says during the interview published by the
weekly “Gente” on July,6th 1970- what I saw and loved:
animals and peasants and I try to plunge
them, as winners, in an atmosphere of dream and legend: the same
attitude I felt when I listened to fairy-tales and legends. And this
evocative aspect revealed when the nostalgia for that extraordinary world occurred.
Yes, my painting may appear disturbing, sometimes unpleasant: but if you
listen to yourself and look inside yourself, you’ll see, want it or not,
that something extraordinary, imaginative, ambiguous, disturbing and oniric
is inside you; dominated, however, by a central image, by a strength that
prevents us from being wrecked in fear. A strength that is faith in man,
love for nature, ability to understand what is happening or is going to
happen in the “undiscover’d country” of Shakespearian memory”. His
first discoveries and the search of adventures show in his first works in
the sixties:in Self-portrait
(1963) Mazzieri, 16 years old, seems to test his skill, not only to
represent himself with the palette in his hands, but also to find out if his
expressive means are suited to go on painting. It’s the beginning of a
painting experience that loves to agree, in a limited range of colours, to
the artist’s “small” world and is marked by a pleasant portrait
painting inspiration, with an affectionate scene of home life, like “The
needlewomen” (1964), where the natural gestures combine with the
sweet thoughtfulness of the girl and with the “doubtful” and pleased
smile of her mother; with a sharp and ironic painting like “The
churchy women”(1966) whose faces reveal the treacherousness of
their thoughts and gossiping, in contrast with the prayers in which they are
taken up. The
declaration of love for the people and places of his childhood involves also
animals and things that I
never saw in your blue iris the infinite become gray
(1968) shows with a sweet contemplative figure where a positive dimension of
memory and nostalgia becomes real. A sphere of sun got lost in the night without
fireflies
(1969) shows the magic moments
of childhood too, with animals of disturbing presence, like in a nightmare,
outlined with imaginative coordinates. Mazzieri is able to give his
creatures a clean slate, because he can be amazed by what he watches with a
poetic attitude, also when he paints, in a violent and tender way at the
same time, images of far-away worlds (The
Bedouins’ eyes pierced the desert mountains; At Banja Luka doves woke us)
he saw enthusiastically during his adventurous trips. The influence of the
wondrous appears between naivety and tenderness also in The
towns gave the square to the moon (1970) where two lovers feel
uneasy because they are observed by men looking like big birds. On
his canvas the artist seems to stroke creatures taken from the treasure of
his childhood. In his memory every form and every colour become a chord note
of beauty, an element of ecstasy and passion, a language made of harmonies
and great compositive alchemies, of subtle irony that
The woman saved through a miracle implies
in a register intelligently based on closed forms strictly connected and
functional to an overall
project Mazzieri created to insert in a square a mighty creature, of subtle
charm and transcendent contemplation, having the same dimensions. Sweet
and sad thoughts come from the depths of consciousness and surprise him in
his lively skill to mix fairy-tales and everyday life of a past time.The
unique and uninterrupted memory of his dialogue with the animals
remains, because a very hard life, without what one would have
expected, had made those few
peasants, living in unsafe wooden and stone houses, men of few words.
Mazzieri will paint their rough hands swollen by everyday hard work. In the
dimension of memory, everything gets a monumental aspect, either of
exaltation or of renewed anguish. From the rural world, where the poor
condition of the workers means everlasting sacrifice and an historical
condition of high human dignity, Mazzieri will get the ideas for his
inventions, where those huge monsters stand out; the monsters the poet Vico
Faggi defines in “Quaderni Liguri di Cultura” (September 1972) “gloomy
and lonely, marked in their wrinkled skin by imperceptible conflicts but
constant in a time without memory, prisoners of their irreparable
difference, bent by a sadness that the sidereal distance of its origin made
mysterious….”. The recovery of this world finds a compositive structure
created by the strong sturdiness of the framework and by the swelling of
figures and places of which the artist is trying to renew the hard and
inviolable existence. Painting becomes a type of knowledge starting from a
memory that changes to communicate an unusual, unexpected
and emblematic content of his childhood
Mazzieri will investigate also in
Mr.
Kafka (1970) that shows the ambiguity of the man-goat or of the
goat-man. There’s the tragic memory of this animal that killed a little
girl when the artist was very young. A figure of anguish and absurdity
(that’s why the title has the name of the Tchek writer) the catholic
tradition considers as the animal of temptation, a kind of devil with
shell horns that stands on apses, on columns of Romanesque parish churches
and on the fronts of Byzantine buildings. His
monsters with “a human face” are always in an uninterrupted dialectic
tension with the reality of contemporary world, they contain the author’s
life experience,
roots of poor places, connections with people’s imaginary, old
suggestions of the hard condition of the Frignano people.That deep sense of
sadness is increased by the formal expressive power of
these harmless monsters, almost absorbed in nostalgic thoughts. In
fact the artist seems to break out the realistic insight of everyday figures
through a reversal and a swelling of proportions, a breach of the ratio of
physical forms, of position and lighting, entering the core of a second
representation, the oneiric one, for a journey to the depth of the“unknown”
of human beings.
The
odd and hybrid figures in Mazzieri’s works have nothing hallucinating and
paranoiac because the tale is structured as a fairy-tale with elements taken
freely from the local and regional tradition, from figures belonging to
oriental and Egyptian art , from mythology, from Emilian painting and
sculpture, from the Romanesque Frignano churches and the Modena cathedral,
from Classicism and Baroque. As Mazzieri is a good “inspired” artist, he
trained in that rich figurative culture with great sacrifices, not on school
desks, but in the museums all over the world living, when he was young, a
bohémien life: because of this he got the nickname “the scoundrel of
painting. His
work has therefore old origins and opens to the wide-ranging great art.
“In his painting- writes Giancarlo Vigorelli (from the exhibition
catalogue at Levi gallery in Milan, March 1974)- we can meet Bruegel or
Bosch, Goya or Blake or perhaps some surrealist painters from Max Ernst to
Dalì, from Bauner to Mayo”. Moreover some aspects of symbolism must be
taken into account, in fact Fabiani quotes Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon.
It’s true that the representation uses stylistic procedures typical of the
imaginary genre, but the myth of female beauty that the artist connotes with
erotic elements, the figures of mythical worlds,the tendency to represent,
in a complete way and in their similarities what was experienced, dreamt or
thought, the attention to the mysterious meaning of life reach the lands of
symbolism, even if Mazzieri got different results, that is to say a charming
and enchanting art. While
examining the works by the artist from Pavullo, a lot of critics found
more or less evident “similarities” with other famous artists.
Enrico Crispolti, in the preface to the monograph “Walter Mac Mazzieri”
(Artioli Editore Modena, 1971) finds a baffling similarity with the
“Mexican artists” in his representing the rural everyday life as heroic,
visionary and “campesino” like Orozco and Rivera. Other painters have
been quoted like Siqueiros and Savinio with their giant figures, like
Magritte with his logic paradoxes and the
dismantling and reassembling of figurative elements of his
imagination. “But his museum- Renzo Margonari says (monograph for the
exhibition at Palazzo Ducale in Pavullo, July-October 1987) has woken up
first of all his Emilian nature and often watching his instinctive way of
painting and the light of his warm colours, for analogy the thought goes to
the figurative procedures by Guercino, to the Carraccio period, when
Parmigianino’s elegance lived together with the rough everyday life by
Annibale: in that period the invention of colour was as important as the
supreme balances of the Rinaissance composition. That art was first of all
religious and in second place of mythological origin. It’s because
Mazzieri’s figures have the characteristics of a pagan sacrality that we
think such opinions about his work are right”. Inside his inventive skill,
the artist wants to live again the cult of values belonging to the most
authentic tradition. The
several expressive registers, sometimes instinctive, make his painting so
unique and rich. The
pale reality of Greek statues (1970) proves the taste for the noble
tradition of a civilization that could state the idea of the aristocratic
characteristic of art; and The pink gate (1972) shows a new
construction with faces full of melancholy and solitude looking puzzled at a
menacing world from which they seem to escape. As
far as the profane heritage of Mazzieri’s art is concerned, Vigorelli says
that “ it’s not wrong to think that at the beginning he remembered some
Romanic
or Gothic painting or sculpture of his land: or if his mind wasn’t
influenced by these meetings or memories, he got in his blood the distant
heritage of Antelami or Wiligelmo; his bestiary comes from the domestic
Middle Ages transmitted from generation to generation”. His real museum is
his land with its art, its history, its rural culture that the artist
organizes in a privileged light, in figurative episodes of affectionate and
imaginative exploration. This is clearly stated in A
swallow made of breath (1977), in fact here the poetic narration,
with the child who helps the swallow to fly away hoping to do the same, is
privileged, but the ancient church in Renno is pointed out in its rational
and essential construction through a clean and skillful drawing and a proper
cromatic sensitivity. A careful eye spying human events seems to enjoy the
ambiguity of his powers. My
shadow blankets (1977) represents the simple architecture of a poor
place and exalts, putting together the humble and the sublime, the peace of
a man who is enjoying nature through the window during a silent night. His
paintings bring back to the desires of a fiery and dreamy spirit, to the
discoveries of youth
and to all the unique experiences of a sublime artistic vocation. In
him we find the subjective imaginary and the common soul of his people and
even erotism that is the excitement of sensuality and the power of feelings,
of feverish experiences felt inside a primitive and full-blooded mountain
nature.An erotism that is also the pleasure of the constant game of calls
for things full of vibrations, a recovery of the artist’s physical
relation with the popular, “barbaric” and picturesque roots of his land.
And the visionary lightning breaks out suddenly among the stimulating
sensations expressed by phallic shapes through which the artist translates
natural and animal elements. This is evident in The puppet theatre of the dwarf flute
(1972) and above all The
puppet theatre of old desire (1974) where the phallic figure has
such an authonomy to become a kind of centaur and the erotic elements reveal
themselves also through particular emphasis on colour (pink, purple, warm
colours). Also The
grace of snow (1972) is about love claiming, here the innocence of
the girl contains desires of guilt and sin during the “temptation” of
the “man-monster”. The work, that draws on the song Gioco
di bimba, will be the cover of Uomo
di pezza, an LP with which the famous group Le Orme will increase their
fame in the Seventies. Love is the kind of feeling that better summarizes
the fullness of life, also when it has familiar elements and is directed to
his daughter Melania
(1979) where beauty and innocence mix together. Melania is a Spring, a
radiant girl with the symbols of life: the flower that sheds a tear, the
dove of peace, a little child with an apple-shape moon
hanging over him (the sense of sin). If the face becomes a sun, the
lower part of the figure takes the aspect of a mountain with a clear
geographical reference to the author’s native land. The
Frignano reality is always situated in a far surrealist area. The life of
real time is transferred consciously in the fictitious time of dream, where
it’s possible to give onself up to lyrical tenderness and memories. The
themes of the past mix with the subjective of the author’s roots; the
fairy-tale and the illusions mix with the cruelty of reality distorted
in an imaginary structure. His never subdued energies seek to conquer
highly imaginative spaces also when the skill and naturalness of his
inventions measure their strength against the beauties of Venice where
Mazzieri lives for about two years, from June 1984. And this escape to the
lagoon town seems to be announced a year before by the work With
a hare in my heart whose light blue colours are a manifestation of a
restless psychology, tormenting itself between dreams and mysteries and
reflect the aspiration to a new creative course. There’s the wish to
discover again the mystery Venice contains. The
artist’s imagination looks for and finds extraordinary models in the town
architectures and works of art. But Mazzieri doesn’t use a pure
“quotationism” prevailing in those years as the Venice Biennal
Exhibition in 1984 proves. The reappraisal of the rich cultural and artistc
heritage of Venice takes place not as a conceptual analysis but in the
contact between conscience and imagination, in forms, never beyond measure,
that go further in hazardous matchings, in symbolic meanings, in a kind of
ironical astonishment. The figures in well-known urban foreshortenings are
nearer everyday life, they have a dimension that is more human than “monstruous”,
they are studied from a point of view of superior wisdom. His more involved
style lingers over these characters and landscapes and takes them to a soft
harmony, to a more human vision, to a visionary realism very close to
everyday life, to very tender melancholies, the ones of the artist who seems
to feel homesick and identifies himself in a figure that, in his conscious
condition of loneliness in Venice (The
honey lagoon), communicates the deep simplicity of common emotions, the
sense of abandon to the sweet love thoughts cultivated in his native land,
to the feelings
informing memories, to the most unique and deepest sensations. But
Venetian places evoke dreams and Mazzieri feeds on emotions, extraordinary
and well-chosen situations and leaves with Your
daughter the moon (1984) the sense of revelation in the ideal woman
showing all her charms and summarizing the harmony of nature and heaven.
With an uninterruptd exploration of the surrounding world, the artist pays a
privileged attention to characters and monuments (The
girl from Salute; The girl from Giudecca, 1985) establishing
relations between the images taken away from hard contingency and finding in
the break of dimension and position (the church on the girl’s head) a
state of amazement that can be reached only by angelic creatures. The
production of
the second half of the Nineties is dedicated to the sculptor Raffaele
Biolchini. A homage to his dearest friend, died in 1994 at the age of 48,
that gave birth a year after to an exhibition at “Melania Arte” in
Pavullo. Mazzieri had lived with Biolchini extraordinary adventures
all over the world in order to visit museums and art galleries. They had
shared creative and human experiences. Together they had cultivated the
dreams of the artists in order to find a place in a difficult field like
painting and sculpture. As time went by, they became brotherly friends and
their relation was uninterrupted and confidential. On this unique human and
artistic experience, as an evidence of an affectionate and analytical look
back, there are drawings (over 100) and paintings where the dream figures by
Mazzieri and the scientific and musical alphabets by Biolchini live again.
“The homage to Raffaele-Mac says- originates from the nostalgia for my
lost friend and from the knowledge of all his works that go through 30 years
of activity, during which we lived common, also expositive, experiences”.
The deep memory and the long frequentation of his friend sculptor’s work
find, in an extraordinary meeting and in a unique adventure, different
elements of well-constructed linguistic developments connected tocommon
facts of life and art. Works like At
the court of the light moon (1995) and The
confetti of the night (1996), where painting stakes relations and
analogies with sculpture, make every image become the interior mirror of the
two artists. So the compositive structure places, in a strong position and
in a renewed descriptive context,
the experiences of discoveries that were with Biolchini during his
human and artistic story: from the
affectionate curiosity for the things expressing their naivety and renewing
the desire of innocence and perfection to the creative consideration on
nature where he finds out unusual elements of harmony (the leaves); from the
symbols (clocks, sundials) and codes to decode of the extraordinary unity of
universal life that inevitably flows to the idea of a poetic and musical
time
that marks man’s work. In An
aries into the heart (1996) Mazzieri can’t forget, with regret,
the sudden death of his friend, from whose heart that stops beating the
birds, symbols of surprising and extraordinary journeys of far and
mysterious charm, leave forever with no return. Also these works, that are
an extension of memories, confirm the extraordinary human and poetic value
of Mazzieri’s art that, in André Breton’s words, seems to say “ In
the world I’m still looking for something that leaves me with my eyes
open, with my eyes closed- in broad daylight- to my silent contemplation”.
In
the last period of his short life Mazzieri cultivates the plan of a series
of works about epic, starting from the Odyssey, of which he leaves us some
evidences (drawings, watercolours) of unaltered extraordinary and fresh
creative source. |
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antologia critica | walter mac mazzieri | |||
