MILAN.- Cortesi Gallery is presenting the exhibition by Maurizio Donzelli at its Milanese headquarters in Palazzo Morigi.
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”.
Born in Brescia in 1958, he lives and works in Brescia. An intellectual artist with a background that ranges from philosophy to anthropology, Maurizio Donzelli has developed extensive research that has at its centre the problem of the image understood as a potential place of concentration, migration and alteration of visual memory. His works evolve through distinct series and experiment with different materials and techniques with the aim of continuing to dive deeper into, and offer the public (a fundamental co-author of Donzelli’s work), an infinite array of allusions and iconic references rooted in the dynamics of time and history, covering disparate geographies. What unites the artist’s entire oeuvre and at the same time makes it readable on multiple levels of depth is precisely its being a conceptual act that turns into a signature, a colour, an unstable and changeable form because it is in constant relation with the gaze of those who are open to it and re-imagine it according to their own sensibility. In this composite atlas of images, the Drawings and Arazzi, Mirrors, O and Nets, highlight the cruciality of the thought behind the creative process of the work, and re-centre our reflection on the principle of making, in other words the creative act, which does not stop with the showing of the work to the world but continues in the reciprocity between it and the viewer, in a making and unmaking of the image that is not a labyrinthine game, but a conscious elicitation of seeing and hearing.
These aspects have prompted many academics, intellectuals and critics to deal with the work of Donzelli over the years, including personal exhibitions in international shows and museums: Spellbound, The Merode, Bruxelles, 2024, Netes Mai, LDR22 Art Glance II, Milan, 2024, Spellbound, Palazzo Martinengo Cesaresco, Brescia, 2023, Fragments, ascoltare la bellezza, Biblioteca Classense, Ravenna, 2022, In Nuce, Museo Civico Medievale, Art City, Bologna, 2021, Thresholds, MAC-Museo di Arte Contemporanea, Lissone, 2020, Diorama, Open Source First Shenzhen Biennale, Luohu Art Museum, Shenzhen, China, 2018, Giardini Cosmici, Palazzo Ducale, Mantova, 2017, Ad Altemps, Nazionale Romano di Palazzo Altemps, Rome, 2015; Metamorfosi, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, 2012, and collective exhibitions: Identità Multiple, Asilo Ciani, Lugano, 2024, Girandole, la molecola della vita, site-specific installation in ‘Lotto, Romanino, Moretto, Ceruti, I campioni della pittura a Brescia e Bergamo’, Palazzo Martinengo Cesaresco, Brescia, 2023, Plot Hunters, Fondazione l’Arsenale d’Iseo, 2022, Metamorphosis, Villa Olmo, Como, 2021, GestoZero. Istantanee 2020, itinerant, Museo di Santa Giulia, Brescia, Museo del Violino, Cremona and ex chiesa di Santa Maria Maddalena, Bergamo, 2020-21, Intuition, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, 2017; Proportio, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, 2015.
Today Maurizio Donzelli’s works are present in numerous public and private collections both in Italy and abroad.
