Imagination, the only superpower human beings have at their disposal. They can't fly, but they can imagine they're flying. And if they do it well, if they imagine it with all their might, maybe their feet even leave the ground. That's the power of imagination, a resource everyone talks about (too much) and hardly anyone uses. Because imagining is frightening, sensing worlds other than our own widens your perspective to limits that are often threatening. It's more comfortable and safer to imagine nothing, to stay still and settle for breathing. Artists like Stefano Mazzolini haven't settled: Mazzolini imagines (almost) everything in his boundless body of artwork.
In his Color Skin series, the artist born in Parma in 1968 applies great masses of colour onto canvas which sometimes carry a sense of thunderous heaviness, as happens in REALE, while in other canvases he tones down the palette and includes figurative echoes, as we see in CAT.
Far more compelling is his Shape series, marked by an investigation into the trompe l'oeil of forms on two-dimensional surfaces. Mazzolini takes the reflections of cubism to their ultimate conclusion to produce a series of paintings that are no longer paintings, that open up and lay bare their innards. Not just interesting dialogues between materials, the expressive possibilities widen too.
What can we say about an artwork like NFFSA! The painting sticks its tongue out at the viewer (or maybe something else), who no doubt smiles at Mazzolini's little joke. But beyond the anecdote, an artwork like this one shows the creativity and nonconformity of the Italian artist, who isn't willing to stay on the surface of painting, to repeat worn-out patterns: and if he does repeat them, he at least tries to offer a personal reflection on the use of a classic device.
Also within the Shape series we can enjoy a recurring motif in Mazzolini's artwork: the silhouette. We see it in TTCSM, where the artist combines the chromatic explosions of the Color Skin series with the opened-up canvas of the Shape series. Stefano also applies textile materials to fill in the silhouette, creating a very expressive effect. This series of silhouettes is very much present in the Parman painter's work, including some of his many drawings. And speaking of drawings, we don't want to miss the chance to single out f2, one of those pieces that also set the viewer's imagination going while proving that Mazzolini is an excellent draughtsman.
But the Italian artist's creativity is so overflowing that he's able to offer the viewer different worlds, as if they came from divergent minds. In the art market it may not be very practical to avoid sticking to a single aesthetic, but Stefano doesn't seem like someone too worried about the practicality of his artwork. In his Fusions series, the Italian painter combines a surrealist impulse with the disintegration of the subject found in painters like Francis Bacon, offering the viewer dislocated human bodies that look like they've been through some infernal cocktail shaker.
These are paintings that force the viewer to walk along the edge of a cliff, that demand a real effort not to look away from a deliciously diabolical spectacle. This threatening side of Mazzolini's artwork also has an echo in some of his extraordinary drawings.
Mazzolini is a byword for unleashed imagination, as we've already seen, and his atelier couldn't be without a fully surrealist series either. Paintings like AP1, ANDEM or a117 show a more controlled and less personal side of the artist, connecting with the work of the totems of the surrealist avant-garde.
“I firmly believe that art's power over the artist is as rewarding as salvation is for a condemned person”. Painting to save yourself, imagining so as not to die: Stefano Mazzolini is without doubt an artist who has thought deeply about the artistic act and who has deliberately decided to put no obstacles in the way of his imagination. And he's done it by delivering a huge quantity of artwork of very diverse aesthetics that even takes in sculpture and poetry.
We invite you to visit Stefano Mazzolini's gallery on Artelista.
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