Cortesi Gallery is pleased to announce Maurizio Donzelli’s new exhibition, which will open at its Lugano venue from March 10 to May 16.
Following the success of his solo show hosted in recent months at Cortesi Gallery in Milan, the artist presents a new project featuring fifteen works created between 2019 and today.
Curated by Alberto Fiz, this exhibition explores the complexity of images, moving beyond stereotypes and homogenization. The title, “Imenigma,” is a term coined by the artist that combines the concepts of enigma and image. This title reflects a journey that consistently challenges the viewer’s gaze, encouraging the audience to seek an independent visual experience.“Donzelli’s entire body of work orbits around a zero point where everything is still possible, and the space of art expands once again,” writes Alberto Fiz.
For this exhibition in Lugano, the artist presents a series of emblematic works that engage in dialogue with one another, allowing the various themes explored in recent years to harmonize into a cohesive context.” I conceived the exhibition as a musical score, where each work represents a variation on the same theme,” says Donzelli.
These impactful works include Mirror (2022), an optical device where the image resides within the reflective surface, captivating the gaze and immersing it in imaginative universes.
The same sense of attraction — combined with a feeling of instability — is also experienced when observing the Ori works from the O series, which can be interpreted as Third Millennium gold backgrounds created through the use of minute particles — pixels of the imagination, tactile marks layered upon one another, becoming a light source concealed within amorphous matter.
The exhibition also includes works from his latest cycle, the Nets, which were presented for the first time last September at Cortesi Gallery in Milan. These nets embrace a lenticular vision, where fragments of a world in flux settle on the surface, creating spaces destined to change with every blink of the eye. Depending on the situation, Donzelli works on the surface with a continuous painterly motion, allowing no room for revisions or interruptions. In other cases, he prefers to capture the initial image — created manually — with photography and then paint over it again. This process gives rise to labyrinthine forms, which can be oriented based on the viewer’s gaze while preserving the imenigma.
Black-and-white and colour represent the two primary areas of research explored in the Nets on display: on the one hand, the rigour of choice evoking the post-avant-garde movements of the 1960s, and on the other, the dominance of emotion, expressed through fluid, expansive chromatic fields that heighten the ambiguity of the composition. Ultimately, this net captures and captivates the viewer’s attention, pulling it away from indifference and apathy.
The exhibition also offers insight into the origins of the Nets, which can be traced back to Donzelli’s thorough research into drawing, approached from a methodological standpoint. Acrylic, watercolour, and Indian ink are just tools used to create experimental works that appear to self-generate, where the artist, without any predefined model, approaches the creative act like a sighted, blind man. From these sophisticated compositions, marks seem to emerge for the first time, developing new and unexpected connections — a process visible in Etcetera Drawing, a large work from 2019 measuring nearly two meters, which will be shown in Lugano along with a series of previously unseen Nets.
Nets, Donzelli’s new monograph published by Nomos Edizioni, will be presented during the exhibition. The publication includes an extensive conversation between Alberto Fiz, the book’s curator, and the artist.
