Colored Shadows: Mauro Capelli

Below written blog post is from the critical text “Ombre Colorate” by Orazio Ferro, for the catalog of “Capelli”, for the exhibition "Mauro Capelli - Ombre colorate" organized by ARTECONI, Contemporary Art in 2015.

 

"Crossing Mauro Capelli's pictorial path is an experience that leads alternately Starting from the objective datum, as is the tradition of pictorial art, Capelli performs, moreover, in the heart of artistic problems and again, in the heart of the human spirit.  Starting as a self-taught person, a perennially parallel path between the innate creative drive and Tevoa sug opera, from the very beginning, one can grasp a constant progression in the search for an equilibrium which takes the naturalistic argument as a pretext to make it the object of technical evolution of a restless soul that seeks itself in art, and art in itself. Also spiritual, a continuous becoming that presents itself as a transformation of the object matter and of the elements that serve to describe it. The same figures that constantly populate his works, are progressively transfigured in the formal elaboration that in Capelli's mind and artistic consciousness proceeds in compliance with the pictorial canons. 

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A technical and lyrical progress that brings ours closer to the great researchers and poets who have crowded the themes of painting since its birth, which is the birth of man. The density of the material that frescoes Mauro Capelli's canvases, refers to the atmosphere of the Renaissance masters, fathers of a tradition and of expressive flavors that continue in his works, to show us that the medium does not change when the aim is aesthetics: the beauty.

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In the technical metamorphosis that characterizes the work of the Bergamasco artist, one can thus retrace the anxieties of the great masters of the past who, spasmodic in their plastic research, have gone through expressive solutions whose steps we can see, with careful analysis, in the work of Capelli. The views of Bergamo or Florence have the same imprint of imaginative phases that bring us back to the landscapes of Gosol by Pablo Picasso, when the formal solution reached the dissolution of the details, opening the space to the primary elements of painting: color and form. It is precisely in the liberation of these from the artist that the pictorial authenticity of Capelli is captured: his honesty. In fact, the pictorial elements in the becoming of his work conquer full autonomy over time, detaching themselves from their creator and moving sinuously from canvas to canvas, almost alone, in an inevitable and uncontrollable process of research.

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The forms change from canvas to canvas, the feminine bodies are glimpsed only by hints of lines that define their outlines, while in still lifes and in houses it is the color itself that becomes shape. In the colored shadows, the creative drive and the indomitable research are respected, and indeed confirmed, through the use of new elements: because in the art of Capelli there is no foreclosure. Once again it is the matter of creation that escapes from its author and dictates the creative and spiritual rules.  With the colored shadows the use of gauze bursts into the artist's "palette", opening the space to new creative dimensions.  Gui, as in poor art, a further creative "miracle" is performed which is that of one who "does a lot with little".

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Gauze, a "poor element", acquire the creative strength and quality that ennobles them as "primary elements of painting". Giving the artist a transversal historical dimension and placing him right on the stage of the great artists of painting: because "great" is  the honesty of his creative intellect. The drafting of the new elements, in the manner of "action painting", occurs almost by chance, but is actually the result of a liberating and conscious creative effort and effort.  The shadow reproduced finally appears as the spiritual "imprint" of the artist transfigured through painting and, left there, almost by chance, on the canvas: as the autographed signature of the artist's spirit. In addition, in the process of continuous research, Capelli gradually explores all the plastic solutions that offer one creative thirst right oasis of watering. The delicacy of the formal three-dimensionality enveloped by the pictorial element is housed in the pittosculptures, as if to underline that the artistic content survives the different expressive forms, indeed it controls them by determining their need. Moreover, that the artistic content develops regardless of the representation, which now escapes without the possibility of control and that the artistic content is the art itself.

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In this working journey, as a good Lombard craftsman, the artist put himself at the service of art, freeing it from his own hand and from himself.  With the honesty of the true artist, Capelli has created a body of works whose essence he no longer retains for himself, but endowing it with full autonomy, he hands it over to generations and history following the lesson of Kandjnski for which the works of art in the  their objectivity conquers that dignity and independence through which they are delivered to those who know how to enjoy them.  In this way, Capelli recovers that fundamental and noble dimension that gives art the didactic sense of service. It is a service that in the time of this third millennium is even more urgent to recover because, as Sartre said: "art has never saved anything or anyone but it is the only thing in which the human soul can reflect itself"."

To learn more about the Italian Artist Mauro Capelli, you can read the Story of the Artist. 

To see his profile page and his collection, please visit Mauro Capelli's Profile Page.