Cortesi Gallery is pleased to announce the new exhibition by Maurizio Donzelli at its Milanese headquarters in Palazzo Morigi, which opens to the public on 16 September and will remain open until 15 November.
The exhibition, curated by Alberto Fiz, features a site-specific installation, a sculpture and a series of works conceived in the last two years, including some created especially for this occasion from the Nets series, which gives its name to the entire exhibition. They are highly striking works, some over two metres tall, which allow us to discover the latest pictorial cycle of the Brescian artist, destined to serve as another element of experimentation with respect to an investigation that constantly examines the viewer’s gaze. Donzelli builds his nets on various supports (paper, wood, fabric, canvas) developing a lenticular vision where the fragments of a world in progress are deposited on the surface. It is through their unpredictable aggregations that a procedural work is created where the very principles of abstraction are questioned. “The Nets”, states Alberto Fiz, “can be read as a journey within the expanding magmatic signature that tends to occupy new spaces, giving life to imaginary architecture”.
The creation of these works is complex: depending on the need, Donzelli can either work on the surface with a continuous pictorial movement that doesn’t allow for second thoughts or interruptions, or capture the initial image created manually with photographic means and then repaint it. “In this way”, explains Donzelli, “not only do I underscore the importance of human action, but first I have to re-observe my nets, let myself be captured by them and respond to this spell with a new painting and new colours”.
Alongside Nets, the exhibition presents the evolution of two already widely appreciated series, Mirrors and O, the gold series. The latter are monochrome works on gold, characterized by minimal particles, sources of light that emerge and immerse themselves, evoking Ravenna mosaics, gold backgrounds and even the conceptual abstractions of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Mirrors works are optical devices made using prismatic lenses; their peculiarity is that they render moot the distinction between true and false in a progressive multiplication of points of view. The image preserved inside the mirrored box, a true wonder box, cannot be separated from the container with which it gives life to a hallucinatory mechanism of the unexpected. The Mirrors pieces, usually hung on the wall, can transform into sculptures, and as part of the Milanese exhibition a three-dimensional work is presented that appears to lose its material component only to be transported into a phantasmatic and mysterious dimension without recognizable proportions.
As part of the exhibition, there is also an immersive installation that could be called an environmental Mirror where Donzelli creates a world that is reflected upside down in a mirror on the ceiling. The floor and walls covered with abstract elements filtered through ultramarine blue evoke an intimate and poetic dimension where the viewer has the impression of being an integral part of the work.
But from Mirrors to Nets, the fundamental aspect of the research conducted by the artist since the 1990s is an investigation into the very nature of the image and our perception.
As Fiz states, therefore, “Donzelli’s entire production orbits around the zero point where everything is still possible and the space for art, which sometimes seems too small to us, begins to expand again”.
