critical anthology

walter mac mazzieri

THE VISION PAINTING BY

Roger Cailois starts his great book, “Au coeur du fantastique”, with this calm, apparently calm confession:” Je suis attiré par le mystère”; however he adds:” C’est ne pas que je m’abandonne avec complaisance aux charmes de féeries ou à la poésie du merveilleux”. So Caillois safeguards himself immediately stating that mystery can’t be identified with the wondrous and the fairy world; and it would be right to affirm that there are two levels, or at least two motions of mystery: one going up and the other going down but above all coming from there. In my opinion even the mystery which can be explained always comes from a subterranean, subconscious and even hellish reign. That is to say that if we try to investigate mystery, we can make it out only going deeply  and deeply inside it. Down and down. And the more we go down, the easier is to come up, also suddenly, like a stroke of the wing: isn’t this the rule of poetry and art, that live thanks to a constant game of the opposites? Poetry might be defined as the exploration of mystery; it’s the constant investigation of mystery, but being careful not to transform it in a vain cultivation of the mysterious world, because it is a fact that poetry,art and the creative act represent the defeat of the unknown and mystery. Afer being questioned, art must be answered: and perhaps it’s too much to affirm that art is always victory on death, it will be enough to say that it’s victory inside ourselves on the death of things and on our own death day by day. Explaining a mystery is like living one more day; maybe living once more. My dear friend Caillois, letting his book, the mystery family tree, rustle on man declares in fact that he is attracted by mystery only because he needs to decode even what is unintelligible. This is the real conclusion of his extraordinary critical journey “au coeur du fantastique”: the act of knowing and reaching “à bout du l’énigme”. To know or to know oneself? In my opinion today it’s necessary to make this choice. Because going on pretending to know ourselves or deceiving ourselves, most of the times we have finished to wear out or even to dissolve the “ego” we thought to probe and, on the contrary, we arrived to ridicule and dismiss it. It’s trying to know all the rest that self-knowledge saves itself and is restored: an “ego” that limits mystery only to itself and doesn’t look for it in the relationship with the world, the others and things, represents the ego’s death and as a consequence the art’s death because the true art is relationship and not incommunicability. Art originates from mystery and takes life from it, but if it dies inside because of it this means art itself is dead.

I wanted to report these short captions before trying to start  a comment about Walter Mac Mazzieri so as to admit naively that it isn’t enough to recognize his painting in its more and more united and coherent artistic results, but it’s necessary to stir it up, to question it and if it’s possible to decode  its symbols, meanings and values. Mac Mazzieri’s painting comes from the mystery reign, going in and out hopelessly. No, it isn’t  a mysterious painting, it’s a painting about mystery. And it’s so full of mystery that some of its rituals are secret even for the most critic eye. But the more it’s closed  inside an ungrazed armour, the more it offers itself asking to be revealed and violated because of the results reached. The major strength and the primary appeal of this extraordinary and unpredictable painting is being at the same time hermetic and catching. In other words or with another image, it’s a painting that doesn’t give a precise answer as far as its background of mystery is concerned, but originating a long series of urgent questions ends up introducing us inside the mystery that, though unscrutable, can be communicated and transmitted to all of us standing in front of his paintings. Where does this magic come from? And it must be said that it’s often a dreadful magic. Where from? Before answering this question, we must ask where this vagabond son of Padania comes from. He was born on 15^th April 1947 during the harsh postwar period that seemed to have taken Italy back to a renewed Middle Ages, in a village on the Modena Apennines called Cà d’Olina near Pavullo, in extreme poverty. It’s not difficult for those who, like me, know those lands and those people to find at once the roots, if not of his painting, of his nature of old child. Here, also if today the mixed progress of a false welfare is spreading, places and men, till a few years ago, had kept the traces of a past of the year 1000, though with a thin crinkled patina of the early 1800. Those were villages that, though with a dull joy in faces and places, might date back to the cruel chronicles by Salimbene de Adam:”… snow and ice were so big during the whole january, that vineyards and fruit-trees froze. And wild animals died because of the freezing weather…, and the tree trunks split because of the big frost…, and the Po froze and people could cross it on  horseback and on foot…”. This is Mazzieri’s original natural landscape of his childhood and later of his painting. It is not wrong to suppose that in his early years he must have been struck by some paintings and some Romantic or Gothic sculptures of his land; or, even if his mind wasn’t struck by those memories or meetings, he got in his blood Antelami’s or Wiligelmo’s shadows as a remote inheritance: his bestiary comes from that familiar Medieval period, from generation to generation. Art is often made of these insertions and transplanting which are often unintentional and careless. In this son of the Apennines that contaminate and contain the Po civilization, the outstanding presence of the barbaric Middle Ages arises and runs, the Middle Ages that luckily rinsed its clothes in the Po and not elsewhere or beyond it: this is the true ancient root of Mazzieri’s painting. The same thing happened to a very modern artist, Asper Jorn, who never denied, but admitted and documented with his very imaginative production,La langue verte et la cuite, that he had derived and had been marked by the signs, the emblems and the symbols of Viking, Carolingian and Gothic Middle Ages. I insisted on Mazzieri’s remote and unconscious roots because I wanted to assert that his painting is not an intellectual painting even if it’s full of mystery, symbols and good to be psycho-analised. It’s not a painting coming from the mind, even when it’s a mind painting but it’s, despite its formal sealing, a painting coming from the blood and, during the secret flow of this river, it dragged a lot of ancient or recent painting with itself, not like imitation or fashion as it happens for most of contemporary artists, but as an inheritance and a sympathetic choice. That’s why in his painting we can meet Brueghel or Bosch, Goya or Blake or some surrealist painters from Max Ernst to Dalì, from Brauner to Mayo. And Crispolti did the right thing to quote, speaking about his compositional gigantism, the great Mexican Oronzo and di Rivera, but above all Crispolti was right when he quoted the rediscovered and revalued Pavel Filanov.

And I’m sure to be right too when I find similarities,which are not surprising in an artist of the Po, with the Slavic soul. The Adriatic sea has often been a link from and to the Slavic world;and from the Apennines it was hard to go down to that bitter and poor sea, but  it was more consistent than going to the other sea. Mazzieri, after having gone often, by land and sea,  to Western Europe,Jugoslavia, Bulgaria and before from North to South, from fjords to Moroccan  and Tunisian beaches, travelling a bit like Rimbaud, a bit like Ferlinghetti, and taking back home a bunch of “enlightenments” or “red ants”; but if the need for sun and adventure takes him to the South, his painting is dominated  and shaken by Northern influences and Slavic transendencies. I don’t know whether he read or not the prophetic text by Kandinsky, The spiritual in art, but to understand better some of his paintings and to appreciate the spirit of his colours, it would be proper to read again some pages from this book:” Like orange- Kandinsky says- originates from red coming near man, when it goes away thanks to light blue violet is born, violet that tends to move away from man…” As far as Filonov is concerned, as Crispoldi said, I agree with it also for a certain mysticism, asceticism and occultism that run in a different way through the painting of both of them and I’d like to quote a passage taken from the good book by Valentine Marcadé,Le rènouveau de l’art pictural russe:” Filonov was the typical hermit-painter, he lived inside his own world, full of resentments and enslaved by a vision of things out of reality. We can say that this vision is already surrealist ahead of time, because we can find there those unusual, wonderful, illogic elements of the dream, that is to say that future continent typical of the surrealist movement. Filonov used to work with an ascetic concentration, in his atelier-cell, he didn’t go out of there for days,  his only food was herbs and brown bread he used to cut with a large kitchen knife, the same knife he used as a steel weapon against all those who dared to disturb him during his work. He never left his painting if it wasn’t finished after a long time.”

I don’t know Mazzieri very well, I talked to him shortly during his exhibition in Milan, at Cortina’s gallery in October 1971; but those who know him better say he works in the same lonely relentless way; in fact Fabiani testifies:” I saw him working. For each painting it took months, from dawn to sunset…” A painting for him represents not only his work but almost a ritual, almost an exorcism. He has some dark daemon to set free or to chain again. Starting a comment about Mazzieri, at once I directed my attention on mystery. All his figural world represents the intermediary of his figure as a man. The change is constant and uninterrupted: he changes himself through the others and every other changes into him , identifying himself with him. I’d like to use an important word often used, for him and for art itself,  by Henry Miller: an everlasting crucifixion with symbols that are contaminated by the sacred and the profane. And going on using important words, one might say that his painting is a crucifixion which is at the same time sadistic and masochist: where do the spreading joy and pain you can read inside each of his paintings start and end? It is this lack, that is to say the impossibility of borders and limits, that surrounds Mazzieri’s painting and vision: it’s typical of imagination , of an “imaginative heart” not to have limits or borders.

I believe, or at least I suppose, that Mazzieri, feeling inside himself the vocation or at least the mystic and perfectionist temptation of his nature and, as a consequence of his painting, is aware of the risks he may run: the mystic artist, relishing his own vision, risks of being captured by it and then defeated, as it happened to Mallarmé, just to quote the most sublime case; and this vision becomes static and stuck when before it was ecstatic. Our Mazzieri will not fall into this abyss because, despite his typically contemporary performance, he has in his blood too many conscious and unconscious bounds with an art coming from a remote past and from the depths. In men and artists it’s always present an umbilical cord linking them to primitive distortions but also to classical perfections, which make him, in an interchangeable way, a peasant or a real madman from Padania and at the same time a refined artist who can pass safely, always inside his land, from Antelami’s latest lessons to the Bologna thirteenth century painters to Longhi and the “Ferrara workshop” artists.

These are the roots of the artist from Pavullo, a painter unique in his existential and creative typicalness; and if we see in his painting itinerary expressionist or surrealist elements or similarities or other contemporary consonances (for example a Slavic artist, the unofficial Neizvestny of particular gigantofigures and of the several Dantean drawings), this is simply the confirmation that only those who have ancient roots can make the great tree of modern art blossom without misunderstandings. Even the values, the symbols, the marks on the wall (Hilda Doolittle would say in a Freudian way) for Mazzieri are of ancient representation: the monsters by Bosch travel relentlessly or hide gelidly in Mazzieri’s paintings, but it’s not a cultural copy or an intellectual interference: no, also without turning to Sade or Freud, Mazzieri is aware, to the obsession or better to naturalness, that in the past those monsters lived inside caves and nowadays live in the skyscrapers of modern men. The question and the answer are always the same: what does man set up against those monsters? Or does he tend to identify himself with their wildness? This question and the answer are dreadful.And often at the first meeting, Mazzieri’s paintings are fearful too. Then suddenly they aren’t fearful any longer: if you look directly at the truth it doesn’t scare you any more, it gives you strength and courage. The spell of his paintings is in the end salutary. They are not visions of an insane mind, not even in the sense of the relation Groddek established between insanity, art and symbols. If we look carefully, these are paintings to be used as a therapy, as a recovery and as a spell: those monsters are hanging over us, asking to be tamed and defeated; at the same time the magic of colours and their titanic sizes calm us down. There is no breaking up, on the contrary there’s soundness, fullness and lasting elements in this painting which seems to originate from the horrors and fears of death and that, instead, is a primitive hymn to primordial life. About Mazzieri Crispolti spoke of an explosion of “infant monstruous” in his painting: that’s right, in fact the child and the artist are afraid of life more than of death and, on the other hand, they are the only people who can challenge death and any other mystery, entering innocently and fearlessly into the whirlpool of life, down and down, down and down.

critical anthology

walter mac mazzieri