LUGANO.- Cortesi Gallery announces a solo show of Maurizio Donzelli (Italy, 1958) the first in their Lugano space.

For this exhibition, Donzelli has selected works from those he has produced over the past two years – from acrylic drawings, to watercolours and his Mirrors – which are arranged in an articulate display that responds to the gallery space.

A Donzelli exhibition is never just a linear presentation of individual and autonomous works of art, even less an inventory of formal possibilities; it is indeed an experiential journey where each piece is in dialogue with another and with the surroundings, generating a rhythm within the exhibition that favours the spectators’ interaction.

In fact, the relationship between the viewer and the work of art is a core theme in Donzelli’s oeuvre, especially in his Mirrors, where prismatic lenses twist the underlaying image in a way that causes it to appear to be ever changing according to the viewer’s position. Resembling a mirror from a certain perspective but then changing into an image as the bystander moves, it is as if the work had a life of its own.

The titles of his series of works (“Eccetera Drawings”, “Disegni del quasi”) stress continuity, fluidity and openness as the backbone of his research. Donzelli has elected drawing to his primary means because it’s a process of discovery from the incipit, when the pencil touches the paper and the sign/image starts to take form.

From that very moment – which seems to evolve following procedures and structures of a biological process – the artist becomes vehicle of an emotional flow; he accompanies and complies with an inner cadence on the verge of memory and discovery, stability and unforeseen developments, control and lack of it which leads him to the finished image. This is to be intended as an articulation of organically originated abstract signs, fragments of the creative process and of a “germination” that never really came to an end.

Paradoxically, in his drawings Donzelli is author of an infinite sign, of a potential “line of the everything”, of a single work that is de-limited and articulated in rhythmic and perceptive intervals thanks to the display, presentational device that always accompanies it.

In past occasions Donzelli’s oeuvre has been in dialogue with historically relevant and highly scenographic places (National Roman Museum Palazzo Altemps, Roma, 2015; Palazzo Barbò, Torre Pallavicina (Bg) 2013; Palazzo Fortuny, Venezia 2012), but this time he operates within the modernist outline of Lugano’s Cortesi Gallery. While he is used to being in dialogue with the stratified past of the buildings and their collections, for his solo at Cortesi, he has started from a far more neutral and functional setting, building up a rich and varied path thanks to the different forms of display, which lead visitors through a journey of repeated encounters with the work.

Conversely to what’s usual for Donzelli, the exhibition is only consumable inside the gallery, and it is articulated in four major spaces/phases: an entrance/introduction hosting two isolated pieces, a wide wall functioning as a “picture gallery” and holding drawings alongside Mirrors, a corridor resulting from a significant alteration of the original space and a smaller room where small scale watercolours are arranged in a single, larger work that can be altered and modified over the years.

Every piece and series that is part of La Linea del Tutto is accompanied by a different setup and expositive model, so as to suggest a variety of ways and times to experience Donzelli’s art.